Who Asks, Who Answers, Who Decides? A Conversation About Going Beyond Listening to Community Input to Ensuring Community Control

Vedette Gavin is the Founder and Principal Consultant for Verge Impact Partners. She is an experienced Public Health strategist and researcher with a long record of developing community-owned solutions to complex neighborhood health challenges. Vedette has spent years working alongside residents to understand how neighborhoods change—and how the people who live there can have real power over that change. She oversaw the Healthy Neighborhood Study, a ten-year participatory action research effort in Greater Boston that equips residents to lead research about their own communities rather than using traditional approaches that treat them as subjects to be studied.

Shawn: The first question I want to open with, if you're comfortable with it — the podcast in general is about people shaping their places, but I want to start with every guest by asking: what place shaped you? Whether it's where you are now, where you grew up, or someplace in between — any way a place has left a mark on you. Then we can get into the agency and power stuff.

Vedette: Yeah, for sure, I love this question. I've lived a lot of places, but I'll speak from the thing that first came to mind. One place I spent a lot of time growing up was my church. It was around the corner from my grandmother's house in Columbus, Ohio, on the north side, in a neighborhood called Linden — which, in every kind of urban metro around the country, is going to be a south side or an east side: a historically Black place that had a freeway built right through it, redlining, before I knew those terms. It was like this — on one half of the street was my grandmother, five blocks down and across the major road was my grandfather's sisters, around the corner was the neighborhood center, and then there was my church.

My church was an old white Lutheran German church, and my grandfather was actually an evangelist — my family helped integrate that church during the Civil Rights Movement. So it was this really interesting dynamic: elders making sauerkraut and sausage, wearing suspenders and little lace dresses, and then all these Black kids from what was now "the hood," but those older white folks came in every Sunday. That church was my first experience with a produce truck — some families still had farms outside Columbus and would bring their truck in. We had swim lessons, they took us to the YMCA every Friday, basketball leagues, tutoring. It was my first job — they hired me at fourteen to be a youth leader. And I think about how I completely did not know I lived in a disinvested place, because of those familial and community connections and how active we were. We built a playground before Kaboom was even a thing. We helped build one of our members a Habitat for Humanity house. I had so many adventures as a young person at that church, in that neighborhood — and now, understanding that the neighborhood was designed to have no opportunity and no infrastructure, which is pretty incredible. So that's the place that shaped me. Shout out to Linden.

Shawn: That's beautiful, thank you so much for sharing it — all the images are so vivid. Neighborhoods have been such a big part of your career, and the way we got to know each other is that I'd been following the Healthy Neighborhood Study, thought it seemed brilliant, filled out the online contact form thinking no stranger actually responds to those — and you did, and it's been the most fun getting to know you and be inspired by you. Tell the listeners about the Healthy Neighborhood Study and the Participatory Action Research model you've used — what that's been about and what you've been doing.

Vedette: Sure. Healthy Neighborhood Study is based in eastern Massachusetts — it's a community-led participatory action research effort, now in its tenth year. The origin: I worked at an organization called Conservation Law Foundation, which was trying to use market-based solutions to support healthy development. This was around 2012 to 2014, and there were a lot of questions about what it means to make health-focused investments in places — how do you aim development so that the way a neighborhood changes actually improves health and well-being.

I joined to do that research. Coming from an organizing background and a participatory-research background, some of the early suggestions were things like, maybe we build a metrics dashboard with health indicators — who has asthma, who has cancer, pharmacy utilization, park score, walk score. And I said, we don't really know the effects of this kind of change — these aren't singular variables, one intervention, one outcome. Neighborhood change is complex and informs a lot more than cancer rates, even though it does inform cancer rates. So what if we asked community members how these changes impact their lives comprehensively, in an integrated way? My now ten-year colleague, Mariana Arcaya, who was the academic co-lead at the time, said, let's just make this whole thing a power-learning effort.

So we started with a blank slate and asked organizations on the front lines of organizing around different aspects of neighborhood change — housing justice, land trusts, green space, environmental justice — what's happening that's not part of the conversation but should be? What kinds of neighborhood change do you know, from lived experience, are having an impact that we're not tracking? What would you need to know about neighborhood change in order to direct it toward what you know it should be? We turned those into our research questions. Because we started with frontline folks, they essentially said, we'll join if the body of frontline actors is legitimate — I'll join if she joins, we'll join if they join. It ended up being nine neighborhoods across eastern Massachusetts — three north of Boston, three south, three in Boston — with a shared research agenda around understanding what matters about how neighborhoods change if we want health justice, health equity, power.

Over ten years, we've had an evolving research agenda centered on those questions — questions formed by frontline community members and residents — and we use all the research talent we have to answer and act on them. We answer them through action research. We want to know: how do we increase community accountability? We test strategies for community accountability. We don't just go around asking how people feel and what the literature says — we do it, and learn from doing it.

Shawn: I'm so fascinated by that design — not just taking a survey to the community to center their voice, but actually co-designing what you're even asking, which is a different layer. I've been part of efforts where you use the best available expertise on what a healthy neighborhood is, on validated survey instruments, designing the best possible instrument, and then bringing it into the community to engage around it — the goal is still centering resident voice, but that's different from saying, you're going to design the survey, you tell us what questions we need to ask. Why is it important to go that deep?

Vedette: When we're talking about healthy neighborhoods, we have to look at the way people experience and interact with their environments holistically, every day. In research, we typically have areas of expertise — I study sidewalks, I study transportation, I study air quality — very deep, specific questions. But what we're trying to do is ask the questions that give frontline folks the information they need to take the next step toward making the neighborhood function the way they want it to. Basically: if it were the job of the people who live in a place to determine whether that place was working well for them and their health and well-being, what would we need to know? Those are substantively different questions than the ones organizations or institutions typically ask about their own contribution to neighborhood change — residents are asking holistically about life opportunity, connection to people, daily experience, in ways that institutions with a specific role in shaping one aspect of change often aren't.

Shawn: It's so different to center the question on your lived experience within the neighborhood, rather than your experience of an organization or a specific set of programs — even if we're not coming from a healthcare lens or an education lens asking a ton of health or education questions, it's really about this neighborhood and your experience of it. The health systems and organizations still matter, but it's the solar system — you put the neighbors and the neighborhood at the center and make sure everything else orbits appropriately. Have you seen other attempts to get to that level, or do you find most community-listening projects centered more on an industry or sector or organization?

Vedette: Most of it does start from an institutional or sectoral place — even in our own origin story, I mentioned working at Conservation Law Foundation, trying to understand the role of shifting capital. That's often where funding for research and an organizational agenda comes from. But one of our decisions in the Healthy Neighborhood Study was to become a consortium — a community research consortium with a shared learning agenda that all members steward and contribute to together. It was important for residents and frontline advocates to be consortium members, because when topical funding comes in — let's figure out the ROI on health metrics, say — that's a topical ask. But then we ask ourselves: even if we build those metrics, will we really shift power? Will we shift practice, shift the system? We'll have a new standard people could adopt, a new model project, a new example — but if we want the default way communities change to actually support and advance the health of people at the margins of that design, we need holistic shifts, and we need to explore and act on more than one topic at a time. Most funded work starts from a specific angle, but it's about the group deciding what the truly transformational piece of learning is, and using the current project or topic to expand the pie and answer a more transformational question while still answering the base question that got everyone studying in the first place. That's kind of how we grew.

Shawn: I love that you're naming the fundamental need to shift how power works. If we're shifting the dynamics of housing affordability, healthcare access, early childhood learning — why does it matter that we're also explicitly asking the question of shifting power dynamics?

Vedette: One of the ways we talk about power in this work is: when you look around, whose agenda is the default agenda? Whose will is being enacted by default? That's who holds the power. When I think about the community I grew up in, the conditions of that community weren't by the community's will — they were by whoever held the power. That disinvestment was a mechanism of a power structure designed to extract, oppress, and control. So when we think about designing the conditions people need to thrive, we have to center the understanding of those who haven't been empowered, because power structures prevented their vision from moving forward — not because it was never tried, but because the system by default isn't set up to advance it.

So we have to locate our inquiry in deciding: who decides if a neighborhood is working well? How do we know that? What do we think is good or better, and how do we know? Working well for whom? We need to develop our own ways of working, measuring, learning, designing those frameworks — we don't have them. What we have are frameworks that represent whoever already holds the power, frameworks that have protected and maintained disinvestment. They stifle things — there are lots of pilot programs, the book van, the library programs, and they're great, but they don't grow and change the system, because we haven't changed the power.

Shawn: You may not know this, but I've quoted you multiple times since we first met — you said, you can't change the inequities if you don't disrupt the power imbalances that created them. Even when power structures decide to invest instead of disinvest, support instead of harm, it's still an outside force in control — and frankly, I'd rather it be a force that intends good than ill, but it's still a force. I think that's such a paradigm shift more people need to reckon with — that even with good intentions, "I'm for justice, I'm for racial equity, I'm for closing health disparities" doesn't mean you've dealt with the power imbalance itself. Where did that lens come from for you — organizing background and training, or lived experience growing up? What led you into that room ten years ago to say, actually, what if we went about it this way?

Vedette: What's coming to mind is an experiential understanding that people create lots of things — when you give over space and resources to them, people make things multiply. I talked about the produce truck, the swim classes — people will build a system to sustain things that serve them, if that system isn't controlled by someone else. In my organizing background, and in my family's heritage around organizing, we know where ambulances came from, where school food programs came from — people on the margins create things all the time, even Promise Neighborhoods, we know where that came from. But when you co-opt and extract, and say we control the resources for your replication of the thing — because self-determination is at the core of wielding power, people are going to wield that power in ways that serve them. When the Black Panther breakfast program got taken out of community control — it had managed to grow and sustain itself, partnerships with growers, grocers, healthcare, cooking moms in the neighborhood — there's always this untapped power that has no system to channel it. People will build the system that lets them sustain that power if it serves them — that's true for those who've hoarded power, and it's true for those who've been marginalized from it. I've just seen that so much in my life: when people get control of resources and build a system that serves them, they're going to grow it.

Shawn: When it's mine, I treat it differently — I care more, whether that's a protective instinct or a delight in cultivating it. I've heard the language of, say, nonprofit housing providers, and I know it comes from a desire to deal with real injustices, but it can feel mechanistic — like the cog of a human being just needs a slot called "house." It doesn't feel like ensuring there's home, belonging, rootedness, ownership. So it's not just about moving resources to where there's too little — the move is the movement of power. Why does that matter specifically at a neighborhood level, rather than some larger regional or governmental scale?

Vedette: When it comes to population health, every dot on the map, every person, lives somewhere, is rooted somewhere — that's where people experience the embodied impacts of their environment. Neighborhoods are a really impactful unit of organizing and inquiry because there's shared experience there, and because so much of our investment and regulation follows neighborhood boundaries — not because there's nothing in common across neighborhoods, but because when we decide which schools to close or improve, which side of town to revitalize, those decisions happen in the context of neighborhood. Historically, socially marginalized people have been bound and cut off by neighborhood too — we decide which neighborhoods the train connects to, which neighborhoods get mortgages, which neighborhoods are policed in a certain way. So when we're looking to repair harms that were enacted through the mechanism of neighborhood, it becomes a really powerful unit by which to wield power together, to repair or create new systems.

Shawn: When we talk about local power, it can sound like we're only talking about getting together to get something done, solve a problem, fix something. How do you connect that idea of power to belonging, or social connectedness, or cohesion?

Vedette: It's interesting that we've socially "rediscovered" that belonging matters — post-2000, suddenly, when it comes to health, we should think about belonging, how revolutionary. But power and belonging are really important together in the collective wielding of power, because belonging informs who I'm willing to go shoulder to shoulder with to dream, to create — which is also an act of risk. People are putting their capital — life capital, social capital, financial capital — on the line to try to do something, and that sense of belonging, of tetheredness to a place and to each other, is what makes that possible. It's not just campaign topic by campaign topic, it's about who I belong to in the life journey.

In the Healthy Neighborhood Study, one of the first things folks said was missing from the urban-development conversation was that engagement isn't just good practice — it actually drives health. So on the survey instrument residents designed, they wanted to measure not just "how well do I feel I fit in my neighborhood" or "do I want to stay," but to what extent and in what ways do I feel ownership over the change happening in my neighborhood. Am I personally involved? Do I perceive others as involved? Is my overall perception that this change is for us — for me, my future, our future? People who have a stronger sense of ownership over a change report better physical and mental health; people who experience the opposite, alienation, report worse. There's something there about whether you perceive a change as being in your favor.

Shawn: That's the gold, to me — being able to communicate that it's not just better schools or better housing, which intuitively connect to better outcomes, but the way those things are done — whether the process reduces or increases your sense of power, ownership, agency — is itself a driver of your outcomes: mental, physical, social, financial health. This isn't just the domain of a few activists — if you actually care about health outcomes, power and participation have to be front and center. In the Healthy Neighborhood Study, as communities organized around this participatory action work, what were some of the more exciting moments — the ones where you thought, that's exactly why we're doing this?

Vedette: One of the first was early on, getting partners on board — I'd assumed every community would want a different survey, want to know different things. But people said, wait, let's run a survey in Lynn too, I want to know that — even if it's not directly relevant here, it's relevant to them, they're facing the same pressure we are. There was this immediate recognition that visibility into each other's experiences was a preview or provision for others' experiences — just because something isn't happening here yet, given the power structure, doesn't mean it won't. You might be two steps ahead of us or two steps behind, but we're all on the same journey. That was really galvanizing, because people sometimes feel neighborhood work isn't scalable, too context-specific, not generalizable — but when the goal of asking and answering a question is usefulness in pursuit of justice, people want to know, and it is relevant.

Another was theory-building and framing — demystifying and reframing the mental models, the frameworks, the information the field uses to guide itself. When we looked at displacement and health data — surveys of thousands of people, longitudinal interviews with people who'd been displaced or moved — trying to make sense of how to talk about the effects of displacement for well-being, the summative point that emerged was: the harm of displacement is that it disconnects people from who and what they need. We give it small names — agency, social cohesion, spatial social network — but it's really that if you're forcibly separated from the people who make your life go, your systems of care, information, material support, and the actual infrastructure you rely on for your job, your healthcare, your kids, your affordability — displacement separates you from who and what you need. We also looked at the intersecting effects of gentrification and climate change — people talk about "green displacement," but what they actually talked about was needing the opportunity to be resilient together: working across difference, working in ways that revitalize and heal so people can stay in the game, and eliminating the sources of harm that forced resilience to be necessary in the first place. When we measure whether we're doing climate-resilience work, grounded in that theory and data, we ask: does it repair, does it heal, does it eliminate root-cause harm — or are we just drawing a flood map to set insurance rates and protect property? Reframing and intervening on the informational infrastructure and knowledge ecosystem that even drives our development goals was another galvanizing piece.

Shawn: I'm fascinated by the structure, the training, the preparation, the investment you made. We can say all day that we believe in the power of local people, that we want resident voice at the center — and mean it with our whole chest — but you have to put systems, structures, training, policies, and funding behind actually making that happen. How did you get people up and running to lead and build this collective efficacy and local power?

Vedette: Great question. Our structure, as a consortium rather than an organization with a research agenda and a community advisory board, is a community-formed, community-held, community-led shared research agenda — that's the first piece. We asked each partner organization to identify three to five residents who were really active in that work — could be teenagers, could be resident researchers in their seventies, needed to be able to speak English to work with the whole group but could be multilingual. We started with interactive workshops to introduce the idea that experience is information, and information can become community knowledge, and how that connects to research — helping people understand they already have experience as researchers: you have things you're curious about, you have experience, you ask questions, you observe.

Because we talk about power, there's also an ethic to power — so we built a workshop experience for people to explore ethics and power, and ethics in research: who holds the power when it comes to ethics, what does it mean not just to report to an IRB but to create our own ethical standards. Then a lot of experiential training — if we wanted to answer this question, what would the sampling need to look like for us to trust the answer? We'd draw out maps: we need parents, so we should go to Little League games; we need people with mobility challenges, so we should go here. About six weeks of different workshops, one a week, not forty hours a week, but always building relationships, always in community spaces — and resident researchers recruit resident researchers; some of our researchers were people who loved being interviewed or taking the survey and asked to become one themselves.

As action research, action has taken different forms in our work — sometimes we form an action just to learn from it, sometimes we take learnings and put them into action. Resident researchers are also activators — they host events, do radio shows, create interactive games, blogs, trainings, summits, bringing the information back into the hands of the residents who will use it. With every round of learning, we expand our footprint of doers. And in each of the nine neighborhoods, we had one community-based organization acting as an anchor — providing community space, running the paychecks, being the trusted voice: "you can trust this study, they're new, we don't know them in Mattapan, but you know us." That was also our accountability structure, because they're all at the table in the consortium, so they're not going to put their name on something they wouldn't feel comfortable standing behind in the community. So: technical research people, advocates and grassroots organizations, one serving as a hub in each neighborhood, and a team of resident researchers doing the action they designed or collecting data through the tool they designed — and we make meaning of it together.

Shawn: I was just having a conversation recently about how there's not a neighborhood that lacks people with passion, vision, giftedness for the future of their place — what's often missing is the pathway to express that power and passion, the resourcing, the training, the capacity. I've heard city officials say, we try to hold community meetings to get input and nobody shows up, nobody cares — and I want to say, nobody showing up is an accurate data point, but your interpretation of that as "nobody cares" might not be. Have you actually ensured the space belongs to them? My guess is people aren't there because they don't feel it's for them, or because even if they showed up and said what they needed to say, they don't believe anyone's going to listen or act — or because they just worked a ten-hour shift and had to find babysitting. But what you're describing, people are eager to jump in without being begged or marketed to — because it's genuinely for them.

Vedette: Right — people care, but it's also, are they going to feel like they're actually contributing something you need to hear? And are they going to get something back that contributes to them?

Shawn: Are there other models you've seen and valued, beyond the standard clipboard, check-the-box community engagement — models that cultivate local power well?

Vedette: So much of what's about narrative is important — the stories communities tell about themselves to the audiences who make decisions about them. Narrative projects can get tokenized, though — "we're going to do a community oral history, put it up in the library, have an event" — but what was that in service of, and who did it actually get to tell a different story to? There are powerful things happening, like the "Hacking the Archive" work in Boston, Catherine Lee's work — looking at all the information out there about a community and asking, what's the true history of what's unfolded here, and what does that mean for where we're going. Speaking truth to power is so important — a lot of times participatory work, CBPR, PAR, participatory planning charrettes, get the truth out, but in a safe space, separate from power, with the best intent — we're not actually speaking that truth to power. Have we diagnosed where the power needs to shift, and does this project actually speak to that? That can come in all forms — the design of a tool, who's participating in what role, participatory budgeting — and at the same time, those same methods can be used and have no effect at all.

Shawn: Right — a hammer can break or build, it's about whose hands, for what purpose. People might hear about your survey and think, just give me that survey, let me take it directly into my neighborhood — but the magic isn't the instrument itself, it's how it was created, why, and who's using it to what end. All these tools — oral history, photo storytelling, participatory budgeting — can break or build. Are we rebuilding power locally, and in building it, turning that power toward the systems that need to encounter it so change actually happens? Which gets at leadership — you can be a profoundly competent leader in a domain, but leading at a neighborhood level in a way that cultivates what we've been talking about is a different kind of leadership. What are the qualities, characteristics, skill sets of leaders who do this well?

Vedette: One sentiment a lot of my colleagues hold: if I step into this role and do this thing, when I'm done, will people's power, positionality, and resources have changed? Not, will the project get done — but, when I'm done acting in this role, will people have more control, more positionality, will their thoughts and leadership be welcomed, listened to, reacted to, will they have places of accountability where they can walk in and say, no, this isn't going the way we want. I'm an authoritative leader in a position of authority because we're producing knowledge together. It's having that mindset of, how do I build power — I know that sounds basic, but it's central.

The colleagues I've seen do this really well multiply people. If I'm the one presenting at all the conferences, on all the panels, writing all the papers — residents mostly don't want to do that, they don't want to spend their time responding to reviewer two's comments. But it should help them toward their own self-determination — did it get them onto the regional oversight board they wanted to be on, did it help them publish their own zine, video, podcast, book, host their own regional summit? Are they able to exercise leadership the way they want to, because they were engaged in this work the same way people with the biggest line items on the grant were? These grants advance our careers — but do they advance all the partners' positionality, resources, and power? If not, you did it wrong.

Shawn: It has to be a fundamental lens or orientation — the first thing you see, not an afterthought. I want to celebrate a hundred more affordable housing units, cradle-to-career programs, all of it — but we need to be celebrating just as loudly when power has shifted, not just when affordability has changed. It has to be the primary lens for evaluating everything: you're putting together a LIHTC project with a hundred units of mixed-income housing — in what way was the community involved, will it increase belonging, sense of place, cohesion with residents? If community input is just an add-on for the grant cycle, neighbors smell that out fast — the same community meeting hosted by two different people, one with that primary lens and one without, people can sniff out in seconds whether it's really for them.

Vedette: Absolutely — and you can go further and ask, not just what role did they play, but did this engagement do something for them they couldn't have done otherwise, something they needed. I mentioned working in Cleveland before, in action research — that team was masterful about making every touchpoint give something back. How can we structure this so more people understand this entrepreneur exists? The city says we have twenty-seven parks — do we, and what condition are they in? If we need input on something, let's hold meetings in all the pocket parks, since we needed to check on them anyway. Or: this block has block parties — let's build an engagement practice that strengthens the block clubs' own positionality. How are we helping the infrastructure and the people lending their time to our project — are we providing input on theirs, too?

Shawn: For leaders who have that fundamental lens — where they don't have to work to access it, they're just evaluating everything through that sense of power — are there common values or experiences that helped them cultivate that, whether innate from childhood or developed over time?

Vedette: One, a little counterintuitive: checking your own ego. So much of what holds people back from working this way, when they want to, is the fear they'll do it wrong — and you will do it wrong, because you've never done it. I've had to be honest with people that I've never done a power project in the community I'm actually from — I've always been an outsider, just moved here, I don't know. So I'll say, I know I'm going to do this wrong, and I'm counting on you — it's your role to tell me when I got it wrong, and whether my proposed way of getting it right actually fits. People who learn their way through this get okay with saying, I didn't know that, I had the best intention, this went wrong, and I learned from it — there's wisdom and abundance in your community partner's ability to teach you what to hold onto and let go of. It's a bit like sitting on the side of a pool being told you can float on your back and not believing it — until you actually try it, turn over in the water, and go, oh, I have lungs, that makes sense. Getting out of the fear of doing it wrong — realizing doing it wrong isn't the end of the world if you're genuinely trying to learn to do it right.

Shawn: It is counterintuitive — there's a kind of freedom in making the most difference once you realize you don't matter quite as much as you think you do. You can actually matter more when you matter a little less to yourself, because you're willing to risk and fail. That mental model places you differently in relation to the community than "I am a leader with expertise, and if that cracks, I have no credibility and can't lead" — which actually becomes the greater threat, even though it feels like more control. Disassembling that sense of expertise into "I'm a co-learner with you in this process, and I'm going to do the scary, risky thing" — I don't want to hold myself too seriously in all of this, but I want to hold our work really seriously. It is terrifying — like jumping off a cliff into a lake. Scary, but there's so much freedom in it. You'll probably fail more, embarrass yourself a bit more, but the joy and freedom of it is so much more compelling if we're willing to take that risk and lean in.

Vedette: And I think the one other small thing I'd add — more a practice than something innate — is: you've got to use what you have in service of working this way. The money doesn't come structured to make this easy, so take the smallest thing you can do, and do it, and do it well and thoroughly. A practical example: one of the first ways I built a line item for resident leadership was in a very small grant, under $280,000. They felt community engagement was important, so they'd given me a $50,000 printing-and-mailing budget. I thought, what if I just use this money for people instead? We went from sending out 20,000 mailers and getting maybe a hundred responses, to holding quarterly community convenings with four or five hundred people at them — because people are the sauce. So: take the small opening, and be on the hunt for how you can shift power, where you can put people in control of a resource, at the head of a strategy, where you can let the people this is actually about have a say in how it should go.

They did include money for me to run a focus group, so I could get that input and design the thing around it — but that's not far enough. The people in a focus group aren't in control of how it goes. They're not the doers. It doesn't increase their standing, positionality, resources, or their own ability to get done what they want to do. So — take a massive mailing budget I don't really know why I even had, and get to the simple, human thing underneath it.