Interdisciplinary Research Leaders
Building a Culture of Health together
Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!
These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live.
I’m Bruce Reilly. I’m the Deputy Director of Voice of the Experienced. I’m also at another organization called Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE). I come to the work that I do from growing up in foster homes, being homeless, going to prison for 12 years, getting out on parole, and then I moved to New Orleans to go to the one law school that admitted me.
I was a former jailhouse lawyer, which is when you’re on the inside and everyone comes to you and says, “Hey, here is my case,” or, “I gotta write a letter to the judge.” All the different issues that people tangle with, they would come to the guy who can write the petition for you, do the research. I was a lawyer before I was a lawyer.
At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.
If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.
But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.
The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening…and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities–and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.
