Honoring connection and fostering joy using focus groups
By Hassan Lubega and Outlaw
Background
For the second year running, we partnered with Boston’s Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement (MOIA) to learn about the impacts of the 2024 cohort of Immigrants Lead Boston (ILB), a program that aims to enhance the skills and tools to grow leadership and civic engagement of immigrant leaders in Boston. Our goal for the project was to learn what leadership and advocacy efforts ILB alumni have been involved in after completion of the program and how the program curriculum supported alumni in their community work.
The Challenges
As with any qualitative data collection, we had to balance surfacing alumni’s individual experiences of community organizing with aligning these stories into a broader story of the program’s impact. Each alum would be making different connections between their time in the program and the leadership and advocacy they are engaging in now. To do this, we initially planned data collection around 18 individual interviews but realized that by conducting 1:1 interviews we would miss an opportunity to leverage and continue building upon the relationships fostered over the course of the program. During preliminary data collection, alumni had expressed a desire for continued connection with their cohort and we saw this next data collection point as an opportunity to gather data while supporting the program in its own goals for building relationships across participants. So, we were tasked to consider how we 1. Adapt our data collection approach in a way that maintains the strengths of our chosen methodology (outcome harvesting) while 2. Prioritizing the relationships alumni built during their time in the program and 3. Centering alumni joy and connection towards the end of year-long cohort experience.
Data+Soul Approach
First we restructured the data collection into focus groups with the added goal of fostering a group experience that is joyful and generative: Joyful in that participants walked away from the session feeling inspired and affirmed and knowing more than they did before participating in the focus group. Generative in that participants built upon the stories of their peers, telling their stories with more nuance than they would have otherwise.
“After not seeing so many of my peers, it was so nice to see their faces. It was like coming back and seeing your families. It was a nice feeling getting together with most of the ILB again.” -Carmen Peña, ILB Alum
Second, we adapted the approach to help structure alumni storytelling. During the focus groups, our team was not responsible for documentation. Instead, as we facilitated alumni chose which parts of their stories to document. This allowed alumni to discuss their stories in a way that honored their individual experiences and allowed our team to collate evidence that speaks to how alumni’s actions tie into a larger movement of immigrant leaders in Boston.
“This is new to me the way that you are doing [this session] and having us answer these questions right at the moment of meeting with you, and I like it. It brought me back to my days in school when I was in college. I like it, it’s a good way to do it.” –ILB Alum
Within this frame, here are four additional considerations that supported joy and helped with data collection during our focus groups:
Consent: We prioritized building trust by ensuring focus group participants have autonomy over whether and how their data is used. We approach consent as an on-going conversation and a process, not just a form. This looked like obtaining and verifying consent and attribution options before, during, and after the focus group and welcoming participants to opt out of sharing their information at any point for any reason. Alumni were told during the group that they could use it as a space to reflect even if they were not interested in sharing their data.
“Both of you [facilitators] have been super helpful, super supportive and gentle and kind in the way that you explain everything and you are making it feel effortless, and you are making it feel like we are not obligated to do it. Like we have the option to leave if we want to. This was the new to do it this way with you.” –ILB Alum
Language Justice: One of our findings from preliminary data collection was how much participants appreciated language accessibility during ILB sessions. To mirror this experience, we translated written materials, had bilingual English-Spanish facilitators, and most importantly, ran some of our groups with simultaneous, two-way interpretation.
[Translated] Something I always believe is very important is not to forget language justice, and those of us who do not speak the language we appreciate your flexibility. It made me feel very comfortable, I am very thankful for the interpreter. I feel good with all of you, I feel reassured with all of you. –ILB Alum
Multimodal Storytelling: Our facilitators held space for alumni to choose how and how much they would like to participate in storytelling. Each focus group included opportunities to share stories verbally, hear and reflect on stories together through discussion, and reflect individually through writing.
Compensation: It is important to honor people’s time. As is good practice in research and evaluation, we provided remuneration to alumni as a token of gratitude for sharing their stories and spending time with us in after-hour sessions and on weekends.
Results
The three focus groups resulted in a robust qualitative dataset for the evaluation. Including verbal and written activities in English and Spanish allowed participants to share comfortably and broadly. Moreover, we engaged with 16 alumni over three, 90-minute focus groups, collecting robust outcome data in less than half the time that individual interviews would have taken. We also saw a difference in the depth of reflection–alumni documenting their stories and experiences themselves offered authenticity to the narrative.
Most importantly, alumni had a chance to share space and reconnect with their cohort members. Beyond data collection, alumni learned from each other more about work going on within the immigrant movement building community, discussed personal and policy challenges within their communities, and celebrated and affirmed each other’s experiences.
[Translated] Every time we talked about the things that we learned for myself I got new things from my peers. We fall in love with the process even further. We are all doing different things, but we all have things in common. We want to work for the community. If I’m good, you’re good. If I grow, my people are going to grow. –Edina Perlera, ILB Alum