Meet the Speakers: Community-Engaged Research
✨ Meet the Speakers ✨
Sustaining Change continues next week with “Community-Engaged Research: Your Community Has the Answers” Whether you are new to the concept of community-engaged research or have committed your career path to it, this conversation will welcome you into the possibility of what happens when community members establish their own research agenda, when they lead the inquiry and co-design dissemination. This plenary will provide insight into how community-engaged research practices can co-locate with traditional academic research, how community scholars and academic scholars can be in right relationship with each other, and opportunities for the field to strengthen the use case for community-engaged research methodologies.
Our Founder and CEO, Rhonda Broussard, will moderate this plenary and you can learn more about her and our featured speakers here.
Rhonda J. Broussard (she/her/elle) is an author, entrepreneur, and futurist. As the Founder & CEO of Beloved Community and Awa by Beloved, PBC, Rhonda works to create sustainable paths to regional racial and economic equity. Her vision for Beloved Community is informed by her leadership in education and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s goal “to create a beloved community” that would “require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”
Rhonda is steadfast in her commitment to community engagement and leadership. She has been recognized as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Culture, is a Highland Leader, a Tulane Mellon Fellow for Community Engaged Research, a Pahara-Aspen Fellow and an Eisenhower Fellow. She currently serves as a Board Director of Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, and Generation Hope. Rhonda has earned a Bachelor of Arts in French and Secondary Education from Washington University in St. Louis, a Masters of Arts in French Studies from The Institute of French Studies at New York University, and has studied in Cameroon, Martinique, Finland, New Zealand and metropolitan France. Rhonda is the author of One Good Question: How Countries Prepare Youth to Lead. You can find Rhonda, her wife Kim, and her bilingual family living in Bulbancha also known as New Orleans, Louisiana where she studies, performs, and occasionally teaches dances from the African diaspora.
Na’ilah Suad Nasir is the sixth President of the Spencer Foundation, which funds education research nationally that seeks to make education systems better for all learners. Prior to joining Spencer, she held a faculty appointment in Education and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where she also served as the chair of African American Studies, then later as a Vice Chancellor. She is a learning scientist whose scholarship focuses on theorizing the nature of learning, and how what we know about learning has implications for designing schools. In her foundation work, she has worked to bring an equity lens to grantmaking, and has spearheaded innovative funding opportunities rooted in the promise of research to support higher quality and more equitable education systems.
She co-chairs the board of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Education, and is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. She is a Past President of the American Educational Research Association and serves on the board of Sage Publications, the National Equity Project, and the UC Berkeley Board of Visitors.
Andrew Nalani is an Inaugural Jackie Bezos Researcher in Residence at Bezos Family Foundation while on scholarly leave from his role as an assistant professor of human and organizational development at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. He studies the organizational dynamics of youth work in community-based and institutionalized settings. As an interdisciplinary community psychologist, he aims to portray how power ideologies and distributions across organizational levels enable or constrain the transformative potential of youth work. He also examines the link between organizational learning and change strategies to reduce inequality and support healing and thriving for youths and communities farthest from opportunity.
In recognition of his scholarship, Nalani received the 2022 Social Policy Article Publication Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence and holds an appointment as a 2023-2025 Research Scholar with the Society for Community Research and Action. In 2018, he was honored as a youth development advocate at the inaugural Gates Foundation Goalkeepers event to accelerate progress towards the sustainable development goals.
In his teaching, he aims to foster students’ capacities for reflection and deliberate action about fundamental questions of purpose, place, and power in organizational and community life.
Nalani earned his Ph.D. in applied psychology from New York University in 2023.
Bianca J. Baldridge is an associate professor of education with expertise in community-based education and critical youth work practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Baldridge’s research explores the sociopolitical context of community-based youth work and critically examines the confluence of race, class, and gender and their impact on educational reforms that shape community-based spaces engaging Black youth in the US. In addition, she explores the organizational and pedagogical practices employed by youth workers amid educational reforms and restructuring.
Baldridge’s book, Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work (Stanford University Press), examines how racialized market-based reforms undermine Black community-based organizations’ efforts to support comprehensive youth development opportunities. Her book received the 2019 American Educational Studies Association Critic’s Choice Book Award. With the support of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship program, Baldridge studied how racial discourse shapes community-based spaces that engage Black youth in predominantly white cities that espouse a liberal and progressive ethos. Her current research examines 1) broader issues of equity facing the out-of-school time nationally, 2) the precarity of Black youth workers and community educators, and 3) how Black community-based youth organizations respond to city change and displacement fueled by gentrification, educational restructuring, and displacement.
Baldridge’s research appears in the American Educational Research Journal, Review of Research in Education, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and Race, Ethnicity, and Education. In addition, Bianca’s experiences as a community-based youth worker in domestic and international contexts continue to inform her research in profound ways. As a former youth worker for over 20 years, Baldridge works with several OST networks, non-profit organizations and facilitates communities of practice with youth workers across the country to sustain justice-oriented and humanizing youth work practices.
Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Register today for “Community-Engaged Research: Your Community Has the Answers”
Thursday, May 28, 2026 11amCST - 12pmCST
Na’ilah Suad Nasir, The Spencer Foundation
Andrew Nalani, Vanderbilt University/Bezos Family Foundation
Bianca J. Baldridge, Harvard Graduate School of Education
