A participatory study to document everyday care work in Peterborough and learn how parents can be supported to raise healthy children.

Why Don’t You is part of the Research for Social Change Lab’s Data Justice for Youth in Care project, where we explored how children's and family's data is being gathered, used, and accessed within child welfare. We interviewed two groups of people: workers in child welfare agencies and youth who are, or were, involved in child welfare.

In the summer of 2022, members of the Research for Social Change Lab interviewed dozens of people with lived and living experience of homelessness in Peterborough, Ontario.

The Peterborough Community Knowledge Network is a diverse group of collaborators serving the Peterborough community who are focused on setting up community-driven data collection initiatives to address different needs identified by community organizations. As a member of the PCKN, the RSCL oversees and manages the group’s website, while the group itself is collectively owned by all participating community organizations.

We engaged people with lived experience, frontline workers, system managers, and other stakeholders in a frank and inclusive discussion about Peterborough’s homeless-serving system. What’s working? What’s not? How can we improve?

We’re mapping the complex data systems, processes, policies and practices that govern young people’s trajectories into and out of homelessness.

Our goal? To make these systems more transparent, user-friendly and equitable.

As Peterborough’s housing and homelessness crisis intensifies, our team of lived experience researchers is documenting the rules and procedures that dictate how housing and shelter resources are distributed in Peterborough.

Our goal? To read these rules and procedures in the context of our legislated obligation to realize the progressive right to housing. Are human rights being respected in Peterborough? Can we do better?

This participatory research project supported the formation of the Youth Action Research Revolution (YARR), a group of young researchers with experience of homelessness in Montreal.

YARR performed ethnographic research among street-involved youth to determine how public institutions such as schools, hospitals and jails exacerbate young people’s housing struggles — and how these institutions can do better.

Two days of inquiry, reflection, and collaborative learning focused on Institutional Ethnography, the sociology for people developed by Dorothy Smith