Don't Mess with Texas: A Reflection on Preparing for Community Engagement with an Unfamiliar Community
Lauren Kouassi
1st Year MPH Epidemiology Student
My name is Lauren Kouassi, and I am excited to be a part of the team heading to Bexar County, Texas, to help perform a Community Health Needs Assessment. As a first-year student in Public Health, being able to put some of the concepts we learn in the classroom into practice has been
an informative experience. One of these concepts is the idea of sustainable and ethical community engagement. I have discussed in several classes the importance of working with communities in a way that honors their own knowledge and centers them on the work being done. This is especially important as representatives of an academic institution that lacks ties to the community we are working with.
As someone interested in community work, especially in largely Black and Brown communities, I was excited to be a part of this project. As an undergraduate student at UM, I have been a part of several organizations serving communities of color and undocumented individuals. While the work was not always public health-oriented, I felt confident that I gained important skills that would help me work more effectively with similar communities in the future. Additionally, throughout my MPH program, I have participated in a diverse selection of public health projects. While most of these projects do not fall under the umbrella of community work, they have also provided me with new skills that would be helpful moving forward. I imagined that I would seamlessly bring these two sides of my professional experience together without putting much thought into it. Especially in regards to the communities I would be working within the San Antonio area, I imagined that my previous experience and awareness of things like language barriers and comfort with engaging with us due to immigration status would put me at an advantage. Over the course of this semester, however, I have let go of some of those assumptions and realized that despite my experiences working with communities with similar demographics, Bexar County has its own culture and norms. I realized that my familiarity with the community based on assumed characteristics would not automatically overcome the issue that my team and I were outsiders to the community, lacking the language and cultural awareness to effectively make community members feel fully at ease.
I would not have reflected on this point without some important steps taken as a project team and individually to help us ensure that our collaborations honor this goal of ethical community engagement and empowering the voices within the community. Some of these steps have included reflecting on what we know or believe about Bexar County and Texas to understand our own assumptions about the community and the kinds of biases we implicitly hold. This also helped us realize how much we did not know about the community. To do more research and fill our gaps in knowledge, we did a scan to understand the community background, as well as a literature review. This helped us understand the demographics of the community and previously highlighted health concerns within the community. Additionally, as someone in the focus group subgroup, I found a webinar entitled Culturally Responsive Focus Groups & Conducting Interviews Paper, presented by Dr. Jori N. Hall from the University of Georgia, to be very informative
(NVivo, 2021). It highlighted important methods to consider when formulating a focus group, from the stages of participant recruitment to evaluation. This was helpful in understanding how to ask questions in a culturally responsive way and in a way that will allow participants to help co-construct new knowledge. I think this is an important framework to consider, given that we are coming from an academic institution. It is very easy for us to come into research from a top-down approach. Using this framework will allow us to enter the community understanding our own lack of knowledge and the importance of the community members in the work we will be doing. While nothing will fully prepare us to navigate the community as fellow members, I feel more comfortable now being able to perform this needs assessment ethically instead of relying solely on general experiences with similar groups. I am excited to see how this manifests during our trip to Texas!