05/30/2025
What do we mean by community care by community members here at The Bridge?
Community-based activities involve working in partnership with affected community members in the planning, development, implementation, and evaluation stages of a project. On the contrary, community-placed activities are developed without the participation of affected community members and solely just take place in a community setting.
The Bridge has always developed and facilitated its research projects in partnership with the people from the project’s target population (homeless, at-risk for homelessness, with disproportionate representation of Indigenous populations, and people with SUD). People with lived experience were involved in formulating research questions, recruitment, consenting, administering baseline and follow up surveys, administering project related tests, data entry, data analysis, manuscript writing and knowledge mobilization of all our projects. Our peer researchers not only work collaboratively to develop the research- but the wrap around support that comes with it as well. Peer support, workshops, resource navigation and so much more is done with our feet planted firmly in a ground-up approach to all the work we do.
Downstream effects of this genuinely participatory community -based approach include the adoption of an approach that allow empowerment as an action-oriented concept with a focus on the removal of formal or informal barriers, such as stigma and discrimination.
This community-focused, grassroots approach is one of the core foundations of The Bridge Model.
-The Bridge Team 🩵🤝
