Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Dancing Toward Equitable Collaboration

Alma’s flustered voice burst out, “¡Pues, ya díganos! ¿Qué quieren que hagamos?” The out-cry startled and confused us, breaking our attention and pulling us away from our facilitation notes—pages replete with our detailed plans for the meeting. It was a Friday evening after each of us had completed a full workday and fought the Los Angeles traffic. We were exhausted, to say the least. Furthermore, our meeting was taking place under time constraints because the East Los Angeles community center where we met was closing in an hour.

The members of our group—six promotoras—were antsy to move our collaborative project along. So were we. We were doggedly making our way through our plans to elicit discussion from the group to hone in the focus and objectives of the promotoras’ project. We were in our fourth meeting and had already spent the first hour attempting to lead a participatory decision–making process by asking the group our carefully crafted open–ended questions about their strengths and needs. The promotoras, who had formed a grassroots collective, had reached out to us in their efforts to develop the skills to initiate their own health promotion projects. On that hot, summer evening they had been politely, if somewhat listlessly, responding to our questions: What skills do you currently use? What skills would you like to gain? What types of research questions would you like to explore?

Alma’s words, “Okay, just tell us what you want us to do already!” marked the moment when we realized that our orchestrated recipe of participatory group processes was not helping us build a relationship with our community partners. It was not serving to move us towards an open exchange of ideas for the project. Alma pushing her chair away from the table where the nine of us were sitting and, crossing her arms, continued, “We have a lot of skills. We can work on diabetes prevention, reproductive health, domestic violence; you name it. Just tell us already! What do you want us to do in this project?” Feeling the stare of our community partners as they awaited an adequate response, one of us sheepishly ventured in Spanish, “Well, we were hoping you’d decide what your project would be. It’s your project. You get to decide.” “Oh,” Yesenia, one of the promotoras, said. “We thought you were going to tell us what to do.” Another added, “I thought you were testing us on our skill level.” Quietly sitting and feeling the time slowly pass us by, we realized we had started on the wrong foot and inadvertently employed a deficit model of conducting our assessment with the group. Like learning a new dance, we had not only lost the steps but had lost track of how to take turns leading and following.

The three of us had won a small departmental grant that encouraged graduate students to engage in community partnerships. Our original idea was to collaborate with this group of seasoned promotoras on a research project of their own design. The members of the group had more experience than each of us working with a diverse range of nonprofit and public health institutions. We were newcomers to the public health field compared to their ten to almost twenty years each of experience. When we first met with them, they shared their desire to address the challenges that their fellow promotores faced personally and professionally in their health promotion work. Despite their experience, their work was poorly paid and rarely did they have a voice in the direction of the programs they implemented. When it came to research, they had only been treated as partners during the recruitment and data collection phases and had been dismissed at the latter stages of research.

As researchers committed to social justice, we saw the project as an antidote to the hierarchies in research and intervention programs we had so often observed in our work. The three of us had first–hand experiences with the stratified structures and often inequitable...