Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos

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In this CVR podcast series, we talk with those doing research and serving victims and learn about the work they've done together.

Tell Us About It, Episode 9: Defining a Well Child in Taos Pueblo with SPIRIT

A convo with Dr. Holly Scheib and Po ChenMar 01Time: 25:43

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On this episode of Tell Us About It, we talk with Dr. Holly Scheib and Po Chen about their work with SPIRIT in the Taos Pueblo tribal community of New Mexico. Due to the length of this conversation, we have split this episode in two. Featured here is the shorter version, with highlights from our conversation. You can also listen to the full conversation here.

SPIRIT stands for Supporting Protection, Integration, and Resources In Tribes. The goal of the project was to work with a local tribe to research community values, key stakeholders, community strengths, and local challenges with respect to child victimization and child wellbeing.

Dr. Holly Scheib is a Global Health and Community Resilience Consultant, and President of Sage Consulting, which works to support technical capacity building in communities and organizations.

Po Chen is the Executive Director of Youth Heartline, which is a child advocacy nonprofit that works to make life safer and better for vulnerable children and their families in the Taos, New Mexico community.

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Transcript:

Susan Howley:

Welcome to Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos. A podcast from the Center for Victim Research, with support from the Office for Victims of Crime. On each episode of Tell Us About It, we talk to researchers and practitioners about their work, the tools being built for use in the field, and how we can work together to build an evidence base for victim services. Today, we’re talking with Po Chen, Executive Director of Youth Heartline, and Dr. Holly Scheib of Sage Consulting. Together, they form SPIRIT – supporting protection, integration and resources in tribes.

Susan Howley:

Holly and Po, welcome, and could I ask you to each introduce yourself, and give a sentence or two about your background?

Holly Scheib:

Sure. I’m Holly Scheib. I’m a Global Health and Community Resilience Consultant. My background includes research associate professor positions at Tulane and George Washington universities, and consulting experiences with universities and NGOs in the humanitarian context all over the world. I’m currently full-time as President of Sage Consulting, where we work to support technical capacity building in communities and organizations.

Po Chen:

And I’m Po Chen. Thank you for having us. As you mentioned, I am Executive Director of Youth Heartline, which is a child advocacy, non-profit in Taos, New Mexico. Our mission is to make life safer and better for vulnerable children and their families in our community. We are the only non-profit in our region to focus on serving children who have suffered abuse or neglect, and each year we provide essential services to over 250 children, youth, and adults. So, SPIRIT stands for supporting, protection, integration and resources in tribes. It was created based on my experience being Executive Director in Youth Heartline, and working with Taos Pueblo.

Susan Howley:

Po, can you tell us briefly about your fellowship project? What specifically were you all trying to do?

Po Chen:

Through the construction of SPIRIT, we’ve identified that there are a lot of questions that we wanted to answer about, specifically about tribal child wellbeing. It developed around a different grant opportunity, which we ended up not receiving. But the fellowship allowed us to take that initial first step. So we scaled back our original large, multi-year vision into something that could be accomplished in the nine months of the fellowship.
The question that we were trying to answer at a fundamental level, that’s going to set the baseline for future work – we hope – is identifying and describing what a thriving child looks like in the context of Taos Pueblo life, both culturally and on an everyday basis as they integrate within the wider state and local community.
So, in order to do this, we worked hard to convene two meetings with stakeholders. The first one, with people who work in fields touching child welfare. So, tribal court, social services, community health and services. The second one with a group of youth to get their input, because in the past, what Holly and I identified as stumbling blocks for previous research projects, sort of seeking to understand this is that a lot of that information was not actually solicited. It’s difficult to talk about what needs to happen in terms of abuse and neglect, when we don’t have a clear idea of what is the target, what is a thriving child?

Susan Howley:

Right. I understand. That’s a great focus to have, and I think a lot of people skip that step. So, when you two worked with the Taos Pueblo community to convene this first stakeholder meeting, did you go into this meeting with the trust already built and feeling like now you can just jump into the work? Or did you continue to incorporate trust building as you started the actual meeting with the stakeholders?

Po Chen:

Well that’s a really good question. I think that trust building doesn’t even really stop. So when we started to pitch SPIRIT, we first brought it to people at Taos Pueblo, whom I work with on a day to day basis. They saw the potential in it, and offered to use their own trust networks to get us meetings with their supervisors. We repeated the process, so on and so forth, each time moving up the leadership hierarchy. We were really serious about tailoring our presentations to the feedback that we received. So feedback prior to these presentations, during the presentations and afterwards, so that we could speak directly to the interests and needs. We spoke to people higher and higher up, up the leadership hierarchy, until we spoke with the tribal administrator. It’s really at this point that there was an inflection point. It was a watershed, because after that, when we reached out to stakeholders for this meeting, we were granted a baseline level of trust, due to our relationship with the tribal administrator and also the stakeholders’ relationship with the tribal administrator. However having earned this with the tribal administrator, it still doesn’t mean that trust building stops. I know that Holly will talk about the specific activities that are designed to build trust during these stakeholder workshops a little bit later.

Susan Howley:

So Holly, can you tell us what sorts of activities did you do at the meeting of stakeholders to really promote full engagement of the participants?

Holly Scheib:

Thank you, I’d love to tell you about this. We scheduled the first workshop with individuals who had direct experience, professional experience, parenting experience, et cetera, with tribal children. We chose our activities very purposely for this. So the first thing we needed to do was to be able to answer questions that had been raised about the complexity of the New Mexico child welfare system. So, on the very first day, we started our workshop here with Po spending several hours presenting the various aspects of these laws, and the ways that they impact tribal communities. So he actually walked through the local state and federal systems for child protection. Then, we turned that afternoon of that first day into exercises that would identify the core values and ideals the community has in terms of their children. As our first workshop began, was conducted with professionals, parents, caregivers, we needed to be careful that the process didn’t turn into a referendum on what’s currently not working. We didn’t want this to be something where people were commenting or thinking about the negative, which is a very easy place to slip to when you’re doing any kind of visioning process. Instead, we needed to spend a lot of time focusing on how we create a positive vision, and work from a perspective that is values driven and based on people’s excitement and energy towards the positive things in their community. To keep the process grounded, we used a tribal rubric. Specifically we referenced four priority areas that Taos Pueblo has recently established. They established this via a resolution, which is tribal law. And this rubric of four tribal priorities were education, housing, economic development, and community health. This provided a structure for our workshops, our processes and exercises.

Susan Howley:

I love the fact that you were trying to keep people focused on the vision and goals, and not slipping into criticism, because once criticism enters the room, people can become defensive and then it sort of shuts down the forward momentum and the openness in the room.

Holly Scheib:

Exactly. That’s exactly right. We spent a lot of time working away from that, which is actually a very difficult thing to do on a group process.

Susan Howley:

So Holly, were there any activities as part of this meeting that you’d like to highlight that really engaged people in a new way?

Holly Scheib:

Sure. So we used a wide range of participatory engagement techniques. They included things like collective drawing, creating multiplication, collective story-telling, word association, ranking activities, and quasi-statistics. We used all of these interchangeably and built on them and repeated many of them over and over again, which means that participants actually get better at things as they move along, and the nature of the exercises can change and become more technically specific as it moves on. The exact methods changed as the day went on. We didn’t necessarily define which exercises we used beforehand. So I found that these methods work best when you’ve kind of got a toolbox and can choose which ones fits the needs of the community and the group at the time. So, for example, we did a case study exercise where we used case studies from Po’s work and created guided questions around the exercises that led participants naturally into a multi-level type analysis. Po, I think has some perspective on this too. At least in the first workshop, he was seeing some of the activities for the first time and could talk a little bit about what he saw, maybe in the group as well.

Po Chen:

Yeah, absolutely. I want to sort of highlight on those case studies that you described. So to describe it a little bit more fully, we do use these scenarios at Youth Heartline to train or supervise visitation staff, and the workshop participants were split into two groups, and each given a different one of these scenarios and a different sheet of questions specific to those scenarios, and guidelines for how to approach the case studies. So some of the questions were very specific, like, “Oh, do you feel like so and so in this scenario was being treated fairly?” But others were focused on what kinds of policies influenced the outcome, and what kinds of different policies, or changes to policy could have led to a different and perhaps better outcome. So, then these two groups presented their answers to each other. It turned out that virtually all of the policy ideas were identical between the two groups, despite having drastically different scenarios and worksheets. You could see their expressions and what they said, that this was having a very powerful impact, that this was a hands-on demonstration of the importance and wide ranging effects of policy. So, folks even said that they got chills at this point, and I think it had a lot to do with participants who were originally unable to attend the second day of the workshop, deciding to make difficult arrangements to show up. I think that it was a huge step in building trust and enthusiasm in the process. I guess another thing that Holly mentioned to me, which I think she should speak about a little bit is our experience working with participants who didn’t always feel as comfortable in English.

Holly Scheib:

Yes so we had many different age ranges in our initial workshop. Particularly some of the elder members, as we did, for example, our drawing exercises, this is tapping into a different part of the brain. When you ask someone to draw something collectively, there’s a different part of the brain that’s engaged. When participants went to try to describe drawings that either they made or other people made, they found themselves reaching for symbols and reaching for language and phrases that weren’t easily accessible in English. We had a little bit of a hiccup, and what we realized very quickly is people wanted to use Tiwa language, their local language. We began to encourage it. This kind of opened a little bit of a floodgate. People weren’t anticipating that they would be able to use their language with English language facilitators. And we did a lot of work to show that one, we were comfortable with it, and two, there was space for it, and three, we volunteered to leave if there came a time where there was something that needed to be discussed that was inappropriate for us to hear. Although we were never asked to leave, I think the fact that we were so open to allowing them the space and the time to explore things in their own ways, that it made the space safe. It ended up that Tiwa got spoken quite a bit in the nature of the workshops over all of the days that we worked together, and it helped the work move along faster. People felt very comfortable kind of pulling different Tiwa phrases and ideals, and it helped them refine the goals and values that we were looking for in the work.

Po Chen:

Yeah, I should mention that in the evaluations we received, particularly after this first workshop, that more than one person pointed out and was appreciative of the fact that we did offer to leave when asked.

Susan Howley:

Now I know one of the issues that can come into play when doing this kind of research is who owns the data. How did you approach that question?

Holly Scheib:

The data’s not ours. We negotiated this and talked about this upfront from the start, and said, particularly because I do represent an academic background, and those are relationships that can be dangerous for tribal communities. So we talked a little in the beginning about how we felt very committed to the idea of data sovereignty, and that anything that happened within the workshops, all of that data belonged to the tribe and belonged to the participants to use however they saw fit, and that our ownership was about the process. We’ve continued to talk about that, and talk about what it means. The participants complete evaluations at the end of every day of the workshop. That is really our data. So the conversation we have with them is that we are very interested in understanding the process, understanding the way that we work, the nature of our workshops, what works very well in our workshops, what we can do better, and that they can give us feedback on that, because that is our science, the process, and that the data is theirs.

Po Chen:

I want to mention, too, sort of piggy backing on what Holly is saying, is that data sovereignty in a tribal context is something that is gaining quite a lot of support within tribes. Right before our first stakeholder meeting, a large number of Taos Pueblo delegates, the so-called Educational Convocation Delegation, participated in I believe a three day conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One of the key components was data sovereignty. Although that was in the context of education, I believe that it was very inspiring for tribes. It sort of falls along their general desire to move towards what’s called self-governance.

Susan Howley:

That’s great. Now you’ve talked a couple of times about having evaluation forms, or what you heard following the meeting. So, generally, what sort of feedback did you hear about this stakeholder meeting? I can tell that you feel it was successful. What were the indicators for that?

Po Chen:

Oh, absolutely. So a couple indicators, we have both formal and informal indicators. On the formal side, we did solicit evaluation forms. I’ll describe some of the feedback that appeared on that. We asked them five questions. Questions such as, how did you feel, was the process culturally sensitive, was it culturally appropriate, was it respectful, what did you learn, those sorts of questions. But also informal, which we touched on a little bit in previous questions. People who originally, when they registered for the workshop said that, well they could only come for the first day, and then making the arrangements, which we understood to involve quite a bit of difficult scheduling shifting, to be available on the second one. All told, our first workshop had 11 participants and these 11 participants represented seven different roles within the tribe. So, we had people who had a leadership position, who worked in administration, who were involved in the educational side, community health, tribal court, something called the priority team, which is tasked with moving forward the four tribal priorities under resolution as Holly described earlier. And also a contingent of delegates that were sent to this educational convocation. So, in addition to that, we would also just hear people expressing amazement. So for instance, when I mentioned that sort of case study exercise at the end of the first day of the workshop, it was very audible. People were telling us that this was exciting, that they were very energized about day two, and making arrangements that they could attend.
All told, the first workshop, the participants contributed a combined 116 hours of work over the course of the two days. For the formal feedback, I’ve taken the liberty of pulling a few choice quotations. I’ll just read a couple of them. So, one quote, “I felt I had my voice heard, it was mentally and physically shown how much impact my input made to my community.” Here’s a second one, quote, “It required a different way of thinking. It used a group process, everyone’s participation. We built on ideas and a way of fine-tuning to capture what we truly wanted to say.” I think one of the most powerful pieces of evaluation that Holly and I received is this next statement, which is, quote, “I learned I am capable to effect change. That I have the knowledge, training and tools deep within myself to be an advocate for change.” That’s a wonderful thing for Holly and me, that we are explicitly in this, and SPIRIT is explicitly designed to build capacity of our partners.

Holly Scheib:

To build off that, I think that the goal, the ultimate goal of participatory work is to work with communities to uncover what people know, but they didn’t know they knew. The power of what knowledge is and to break down the hierarchy that there’s only certain types of knowledge that is privilege. So that last comment, when we sat together, Po and I, reading these, and when we found that last comment, our initial thought was, this is it. This is exactly what we’re working for here, and whatever we’re doing is speaking directly to the ultimate goal of any kind of participatory process. So, we were particularly excited by that feedback.

Susan Howley:

That’s just wonderful. Now you mentioned that you did a second group as well with the youth. What was your experience there?

Holly Scheib:

So participants in the first workshops were so eager for more. They wanted us to replicate this activity with elders, with tribal leadership, with youth, et cetera, et cetera. So upon conversation with the tribal administrator, we decided to carry out a second workshop with youth, since SPIRIT is about child well-being. The workshop itself happened a month after, about four weeks after the initial workshop. It happened over a day in June, so it was during the summer. We did get data relevant to the goals of the fellowship. However, we learned things from this process that have influenced our work since then. So, first, one of the things that we did, we didn’t meet with the youth before this workshop. So unlike all of the other processes where we had had opportunities to talk to all different kinds of stakeholders, and they had some familiarity with us, some familiarity with how we work, we were able to kind of prep people a little with what to expect. With the youth, they were completely new to us. So we coordinated this with adults, and with youth program coordinators. Some of those people coordinating were also unknown to us, and had not participated in our prior workshop. So there was an added layer of not only of youth not being prepped for the experience, but the adults who were bringing them and coordinating them also not really knowing what this experience would be. So in that sense, I was limited a little bit in my tool box in terms of activities. Po and I really didn’t know who to expect or what to expect, or even a clear idea of the age ranges to expect. So, we realized, once we started working with them, that having a meeting room with facilitators is actually not the best way to engage with youth. It’s too much like a classroom experience, which is actually not the safest place for Native children. So, had we had more insight into this, we could have used more outside practices. We could have rethought the structure of the workshop to be outdoors, and to involve photography or theater or music, or things that were more relevant to their everyday lives. So from this, we learned that it’s really important for us to meet directly with potential participants before each workshop, so that we can understand them, and we can better meet their needs and speak to their experiences in the process.

Susan Howley:

So, just taking this conversation a bit broader, you’ve done such great work with this community, and things are going strong. What do you see in the future for this type of work with other Native American communities, or other areas of community-based participatory research?

Holly Scheib:

That’s a great question. I feel that any scientist, practitioner, any community organization is very familiar with the need for reliable data that’s relevant, actionable, and understandable. There’s a huge divide between community level practitioners and researchers. So, those on the community level are often distrustful of evaluation and evaluators, and of research and researchers, because they feel it’s not relevant to their lives. Then those on the research side often undervalue or maybe even ignore qualitative or participatory research, because they don’t really see it as fitting into a positivist or post-positivist scientific method. That’s a narrow lens from which to see the world, and really creates a big divide between two groups that are ultimately speaking the same language, and need to work together. And I see community-based participatory research bridging that gap.

Po Chen:

What’s been really exciting about working with Taos Pueblo, not only because it’s in my own backyard and actually has deep ramifications for how to support all children, vulnerable children and their families in our community, because the intersection of tribal local state and federal child welfare systems is not working so well. That’s the original genesis of SPIRIT. But, I also believe that such problems are not unique to Taos Pueblo. They’re not even unique to Northern New Mexico. It’s all around the state, and it’s in places like Alaska, and South Dakota. It’s all over the place when there is that intersection of tribal communities with a very different set of histories and cultural understandings and practices that need to work in the boundaries of federal and state child welfare systems, which is really dispersed. So, what I’m really excited about with SPIRIT is that it sort of rebalances the scale of how that intersection of these multiple systems needs to work. Instead of putting all of the eggs into everyone needs to just get on board with the federal and state systems, it’s really exploring what’s powerful and helpful and effective in these tribal communities, because they are experts in a way that the federal government, and the state and local communities just won’t ever be. So, strengthening that aspect of that intersection, hopefully we can get to a more equal and functional intersecting child welfare system.

Susan Howley:

Holly and Po, I want to thank you so much for the time that you’ve spent with us today. You’ve given us so much to think about how to be truly inclusive, as we gather information from our community stakeholders, and give them the tools that they need to do this work on their own.

Po Chen:

Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s been a pleasure.

Holly Scheib:

Thank you so much.