Building a New Table

A vital guide to centering community knowledge to generate effective solutions to inequality

When organizations take on social problems, from school reform to conservation to healthcare disparities, community members are sometimes "invited to the table" to share their insights. But if the table has already been set with institutional assumptions about the issue at hand, the solutions that emerge often have little to do with the people and places they are meant to help. When this is the case, inclusion can only go so far: as Dr. Brittany Lewis argues, it's time to build a new table.

Drawing on her work as a community researcher and nonprofit consultant, Dr. Lewis developed the Equity in Action (EIA) model as a framework for closing the gaps between communities, researchers, and institutions. By centering the knowledge of the community members who ostensibly benefit from the work of various organizations, EIA makes research questions more relevant and the research process more targeted, getting at the roots of social inequality to find sustainable, impactful solutions. In Building a New Table, Dr. Lewis guides readers through the steps of EIA: assessing the landscape, building the community action council, co-developing a research approach, data collection, community review, and identifying solutions. Along the way, she highlights the values imbued in each step and the skills needed for success as well as how the model can be adapted for different organizations.

Practical and hands-on, Building a New Table explores each phase of the Equity in Action model through case studies featuring commentary from organizational leaders and staff who have used it to reshape their engagement with the communities they serve. Demonstrating how to ground solutions in lessons from lived experience, this book teaches how authentic community engagement and community-driven research creates reciprocal, generative relationships that can enact real, systemic change.

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Dr. Brittany Lewis, founder and CEO of Research in Action, a social benefit corporation, has spent more than fifteen years working in partnership with Twin Cities communities. She served as senior research associate at the University of Minnesota's Center for Urban and Regional Affairs and is featured in the Upper Midwest Emmy Award–winning documentary Jim Crow of the North and the radio documentary A Fiery Unrest: Why Plymouth Avenue Burned. She was a Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank Scholar-in-Residence, recipient of a 2020 Bush Foundation Fellowship, and winner of the Minneapolis Civil Rights Department 2020 History Makers at Home Award. Named one of the top 100+ Leading Black Women in 2020 by the Minnesota Black Chamber of Commerce, she was selected to deliver a TEDx Minneapolis talk, "The Illusion of Choice."