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What is the Community Action Hub (CAH)?

The Community Action Hub is a collaborative partnership led by Community Researchers—people with lived experience (PWLE) of homelessness—with support from professional researchers from the Institute for Community Health and systems experts from United Way of Massachusetts Bay. Our partnership is driven by the need to fill the existing gap in opportunities for systems to take advantage of the valuable lived experience of PWLE. The CAH currently has seven active Community Researchers with a wide variety of backgrounds, identities, and experience.

 

CAH’s Theory of Change:

• Creating low-barrier employment: The impacts of homelessness do not end as soon as a person is housed. The CAH seeks to provide just, meaningful, and dignified employment opportunities that meet people where they are to provide stability, ongoing support, and professional development. We work to lower barriers, maintain flexibility, and provide all the tools and knowledge needed to do our work.

• Prioritizing community and wellness: We know that people heal from trauma and emerge stronger on the other side. The CAH’s approach is deeply rooted in trauma-informed practices as we strive to create the conditions for post-traumatic growth and healing. Thus we dedicate time and resources to building community and supporting wellness to sustain ourselves in the work for the long haul.

• Designing and conducting research about homelessness: Most existing research on homelessness is not rooted in the perspectives of people who have experienced it. We seek to change this by conducting rigorous research which is designed, conducted, and analyzed by PWLE.

• Working for systems change: Both the lived experience-based expertise of our members and our research findings are needed in decision-making spaces. We therefore connect members with opportunities for their voices to be heard and make our research findings available to policymakers and program leaders. In this way we will contribute to legislative and policy change to improve systems alignment and practices in line with our research findings.

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How we work:

• Collective decision-making. Decisions about what we do and how we do it are made through a consensus decision-making process. All members contribute design ideas and critique our current practices as needed. 

• Everyone learns, everyone teaches. Everyone participating in our organization has valuable expertise – lived experience-based expertise, formal education-based expertise, and systems navigation-based expertise. Some of this expertise is valued more in the outside world, but we strive to resist this external value system. We all teach one another, and we all learn from one another.

• Stepping up and stepping back. Everyone involved in the CAH has complicated lives and obligations. We expect that we will all be able to be involved in the CAH more sometimes and less other times. Every participant – community researchers, ICH staff, and United Way staff – may choose to be inactive at any time, and become active again with no penalty.

 

Our research!

Our current research project, “From Surviving to Thriving: Narratives of Navigating Homelessness, Institutional Systems, and the Search for Flourishing” is designed to understand the strengths, the resources, and the barriers experienced by people who have recently experienced homelessness. The project is guided by the question: How do people navigate systems to not only survive, but to support their own growth and healing? Using the model of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), we will interview people who have experienced homelessness and recently obtained permanent housing to learn about their experiences with navigating the multiple systems necessary to survive homelessness, enter permanent housing, and begin the process of healing. ICH researchers work alongside community researchers to support project design and implementation. Currently, the community researchers are preparing for participant recruitment and data collection in the Summer of 2026.

 

We are also involved in other research projects: we are advising a case study about supporting people in eviction prevention legal proceedings; we are also participating in an ongoing project on post-traumatic growth. We have also begun planning for building a service in which we provide consultation for researchers doing research related to housing and homelessness. 

 

Connect with us!

We would love to connect with you! We value the opportunity to tell you more about our work and to learn from you about yours. Engage, network, or consult us here.