By Wendy Y. Perez, Ph.D, Joanna D. Geller, Ph.D, Lisette M. DeSouza, Ph.D, & Arianna Jackson
Introduction
In 2021, the William T. Grant Foundation awarded the Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation at the NYU Metro Center a grant to explore how a community-based civic leadership initiative for parents/caregivers and their children--the Children’s Leadership Training Institute (CLTI) and the Parent Leadership Training Institute (PLTI)--could disrupt power inequities to influence educational systems and institutions. We hypothesized that simultaneously building the leadership capacity of both children and adults would embed civic knowledge, skills, and confidence within the family, and lead to more sustainable civic engagement and collective action. The PLTI and CLTI Participatory Action Research team is one part of the larger 4-year mixed methods study.
Participatory action research (PAR) includes representative voices of study participants on the research team and aims to partner with communities to conduct research that will benefit their communities (De Oliveira, 2023). Youth participatory action research (YPAR) allows youth to conduct research relevant to their lives, schools, and communities (Leman et al., 2025). Importantly, YPAR acknowledges that youth have expertise regarding their lived experiences, which are often the focus of research (Leman et al., 2025). YPAR can be an opportunity for youth to exercise autonomy, gain leadership skills, and develop their social identities as changemakers (Ballonoff Suleiman et al., 2021). Similarly, adults benefit from PAR because it allows for trust and mutual respect, diverse perspectives, the lived experiences of those studied to be part of the research, and action based on the results (Balcazar et al., 2009).
Towards this end, our research team partnered with three PLTI/CLTI sites nationwide to form a PAR team for our study on family civics. PLTI and CLTI include 20-week lessons on topics such as parents as change agents, how local systems work and how to interact with them, using your voice, and public policy. Each program consists of a community project. CLTI classes parallel PLTI class topics and are presented in age appropriate ways to the children who participate who usually range in age from 3-12.
One of our study research questions focused on how CLTI and PLTI alumni continued to be civically engaged and how they created stronger communities for children and families. We knew that CLTI and PLTI alumni and staff would be best positioned to help answer that question, as they were closer to the experience and more connected with their communities. We also knew from past projects that participatory research is rewarding for individuals and organizations (Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation, 2024). In this brief, we share how we recruited PAR team members and organized meetings. We also share best practices, challenges, and recommendations. We include sample meeting agendas as an appendix.