2021

Julie Beckett was a brilliant, tenacious, and unrelenting advocate for families of children with disabilities. Her persistence resulted in many important advances for these families, including the Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services Waivers. The first of which enabled her daughter, Katie Beckett (who would go on to become a powerful advocate in her own right) to live at home. Julie did not stop there, however. She tirelessly recruited mothers to help ensure the waivers were made available across the country. As a result of their continued advocacy hundreds of thousands of families (like mine) are whole as our children live and receive medical care at home without having to live in a hospital.

Julie also co-founded Family Voices, a national family-led organization of families and friends of children and youth with special health care needs and disabilities. Family Voices promotes partnership with families at all levels of healthcare (individual and policy decision-making levels) in order to improve health care services and policies for children.

2020

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a collaborative research method that calls for power to be deliberately shared between the researcher and the researched. PAR affirms that experience can be a basis of knowing and that experiential learning can lead to a legitimate form of knowledge that influences practice.

While PAR is commonly used as a methodology for community-based research and social change, this short film illustrates how LifeWorks, an organization dedicated to self-sufficiency, utilized PAR to simultaneously empower participants and improve program effectiveness. 

LifeWorks engaged in PAR to solve a specific problem: 44% of the youth housed through were ultimately violating agreements and needed rehousing. Youth were bringing their street families -unauthorized tenants- into their homes to live with them or self-isolating.

While they had an idea of why this was happening, organizational leaders sought to better understand the problem from the perspective of the youth. LifeWorks knew they had a lot to learn from their lived expertise, ideas, and input . So, Leaders invited some of the youth receiving housing services to partner with them.

The youth learned technical skills such as research, analysis, and design thinking, and are conducting research and analysis, and sharing their input and ideas. Together, LifeWorks leadership and the youth are working to improve young people’s housing stability by co-designing program improvements.