The Challenge
We know that caregiving responsibilities have a disproportionate impact on women’s lives. And while there’s no shortage of evidence of this impact—tackling these challenges at the community level calls for community context and community-led approaches.
Davis Pier partnered with the Valley Regional Enterprise Network (VREN) to better understand how caregiving and employment responsibilities were creating barriers for women in the Annapolis Valley.
The Approach
Davis Pier’s work in the research space sits at its intersection with community. We strive to conduct research alongside people and in alignment with community interests, assets, and needs.
The Taking Care of the Valley project adopted a participatory research and design approach. This method was chosen to enable active and shared decision making with community.
A participatory research and design approach was used to enable active and shared decision making with community.
The first step for this project was to find a community partner to provide community expertise and help convene people in the Annapolis Valley. The Valley Regional Enterprise Network (VREN) is an organization that acts as a catalyst for a thriving, sustainable, and inclusive regional economy in the Valley. As partners, we secured funding to tackle how caregiving and employment responsibilities were creating barriers for women in this region.
To ensure this work could be co-created alongside community, we recruited women from across the Annapolis Valley to join the project. These women had lived experience with personal and professional caregiving and brought a critical perspective to the work. Alongside the Davis Pier team and the VREN, this group formed the Steering Committee for the project. This committee adopted a consensus-based decision-making process. This meant the group had to decide and agree on how we wanted to work together, what our research question would be, and how would attempt to answer it.
The Outcome
We worked together to craft our research question and chose how to carry out the research phase. This robust process included everything from how to recruit people, to how to phrase and deliver questions.
The Steering Committee combined the synthesized learning from the research phase with our knowledge of caregiving, the Valley, and service design to choose a specific issue to focus our work together. From here we developed and proposed three potential solutions to affect tangible change and sought the interest of local businesses to engage in furthering developing and testing these solutions.
The three potential solutions were:
- An employer-driven childcare navigator (cluster)
- Dialogue and data gathering through dedicated taskforce
- Engagement campaign that crowdsources insights & solutions*
*Note: #3 was not further developed and, instead, was reframed as a foundational approach to collaboration and implementation of other solutions in a high-fidelity testing scenario.
The Impact
Applied research with a human-centred approach unfolds a little more organically than traditional research methods and design. The path can be circuitous and, in this case, the process of how we did this work together mattered as much as its outcomes.
Although we have not been able to implement any solutions in the Valley yet, the impact of the Taking Care of the Valley Project has shown up in tangible and meaningful ways.
The Opportunity
Taking Care of the Valley serves as a valuable model for approaching community challenges at the community level. Davis Pier’s work strives to integrate participatory research design and deep community engagement to empower communities to create more inclusive opportunities for economic participation, employment attachment, and wellbeing.
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