CARE – Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation

CARE is a global hub for justice-based communication research that uses participatory and culture-centered methodologies to develop community-driven com­munication solutions for building and sustaining human health and wellbeing.

Blessing the place where community garden will grow, Highbury, NZ

CORE PRINCIPLE

CARE believes that communities are their own best problem-solvers. We work closely with communities at the margins, worker-led unions, community organisations, social movements, policymakers, programme planners and evaluators in developing culturally-cen­tered solutions. The culture-centered process catalyzes community members at the margins to create and participate in communication infrastructures, expressing their voices in building solutions to the problems they conceptual­ize. Past and ongoing work of CARE explores culture-centered social change in solidarity with communities experiencing deprivation, gender diverse communities, indigenous communities, racial and ethnic minority communities, religious minority communities, sex workers, domestic workers, low-wage migrant workers, workers in health threatening industries, and workers in the gig economy.

GOALS

CARE seeks to:

  • Create a strategic research core for the social scientific study of international health, development, and social change communication, driven by the cultural worldviews and knowledge systems of local communities at the margins;
  • Develop culture-centered preventive and structurally transformative interventions through the participation of local commu­nities in democratic processes for imagining health and wellbeing based on their everyday lived experiences;
  • Develop and sustain justice-based knowledge generating tools and resources in communities at the margins;
  • Participate in solidarity with communities at the margins as they imagine community-anchored, place-based democratic processes of social change;
  • Create community-academic-activist connections that sustain community-led interventions for health and wellbeing;
  • Disseminate the core principles and lessons learned from the culture-centered interventions being carried out in communities at the margins across the globe;
  • Build community-owned health and social change communication research capacity internationally by creating an international training hub for the next generation of health and social change communica­tion theorists, researchers, practitioners, community organizers, advocates, activists, and policymakers.

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