Designing Community Responsibility Decision Points into Engaged, Participatory Work

This paper is based on the first phase of an environmental health risk assessment on the U.S.-Mexico border in which the principal investigators (PIs) sought to reframe environmental health risk assessment through participatory methods that center on community responsibility. Rather than beginning with pre-established scientific questions, the PIs structured the project to begin with community perceptions and lived experiences. Our team, which, in addition to the two PIs, included two evaluators and three technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers, designed, implemented, and analyzed three community listening meetings. This project speaks to current scholarship in human-centered design that values community listening and meaningful participation. Specifically, we speak to the value of emphasizing community responsibility decision points in the implementation of Carlson's [1] camaraderie framework. We propose that designing and implementing community responsibility decision points have implications for data management, advocacy, and sustainability.