Building Leadership Through Partnerships: Using Concept Mapping to Develop Community Capacity to Address Gender-Based...

To address an unmet need for community-driven gender-based violence (GBV) responses in areas with high levels of precarious employment, a community-based organization partnered with academic researchers and community members to use concept mapping to inform the design of a leadership development program.

The objectives of the research were to identify and prioritize the skills, knowledge, and resources that "worker-leaders" (informal activists) need to help prevent and reduce acts of GBV directed toward individuals working in low-wage and precarious employment situations.

Using concept mapping as part of a community-based participatory project, the community-academic research team elicited input from Latinx and Korean residents from low-income immigrant communities. Individuals brainstormed, sorted, and rated the skills and resources necessary to reduce and respond to GBV. Quantitative analyses were jointly interpreted by community and academic researchers.

Sixty-nine individuals participated in at least one concept mapping activity. Twenty-one unique skills and resources across seven thematic constructs were identified. Participants believed that skills and resources related to Workplace Violence would be most effective at building trainee capacity to address GBV, but Employee and Survivor Support topics were more likely to draw worker-leaders to a program. Access to organizations that support survivors was considered both highly effective and likely to be of great interest.

This research ensures that the GBV leadership training program is grounded in community-generated evidence. The process of undertaking this research was at least as useful in the development of the leadership of the program as the results themselves.