Young people, families, and other community members deserve a rich array of resources designed to support their whole selves, including culturally responsive services that promote a positive cultural identity and are responsive to the diversity of families in the community. Achieving this goal requires recognizing that community members know best the challenges that they are facing, what the goals of programs should be, how the programs should be delivered, and what they trust as evidence of effectiveness. As CSSP highlighted in the brief Culture is Healing: Removing the Barriers Facing Providers of Culturally Responsive Services, community-based organizations (CBOs) across the country are offering badly needed culturally responsive supports that are aligned with these principles. Their services are either co-designed with the communities of color they serve, and/or that are delivered in a manner that is consistent with the values, customs, and self-identified needs of participants. To assess the benefit of their work to the communities they are serving, providers look at high demand for services, waitlists, community referrals, and other evidence that their services are trusted and valued by their respective communities.
However, due to research norms and a funding environment that evaluate programs according to rigid definitions of evidence that prefer empirical evidence over community-defined evidence, such beneficial programs remain underfunded by government agencies. This restrictive approach hampers the development and availability of resources that directly address a specific community’s concerns because culturally responsive services are less likely to have empirical data but to instead rely on forms of evidence, defined by the community, that research clearinghouses and funders do not accept as valid. For communities of color, which are already underserved, and often inappropriately served, by current human services systems, the negative impacts of these decisions are significant.
Children, youth, and families across the country deserve better. It is time that policymakers adopt a radically different approach to investing in community supports for all families in the community. Both federal and state policymakers must accept a broader definition of evidence that includes evidence from the community and evaluate programs and funding proposals according to this expanded evidence standard. Ultimately, the people who are supposed to benefit from services are the best judges of what works for them, and they deserve for policymakers to prioritize their voices in determining what counts as evidence that a program is valuable and is meeting their expressed needs. The accompanying Advancing Culturally Responsive Services: Incorporating Community-Defined Evidence When Evaluating What Works discusses how government funders currently disadvantage families of color by defining evidence so narrowly that they prioritize rigidity over rigor and exclude community-defined evidence, highlights how community-based providers are using community-defined evidence to evaluate their efforts, and identifies actions policymakers can take to increase investments in responsive services that help families thrive.
