During the Spring 2022 semester, I took the fabulous course Assessing and Engaging Communities for Social Change. It was a course offered for the first time as part of curriculum updates, while at the same time it was building off a course a few of us had taken the previous year. This main class work projects for the semester revolved around a community assessment.
The three of us in my group – Kymberly Jackson, Cindy Miller, and myself – took the class as a substitution because our non-field courses were cancelled at the beginning of the semester. So the professor – who two of us knew because we had classes with him before – gave our group a reworked, more challenging version of the assignment in the syllabus to help us meet program requirements. Our version involved individual interviews, a focus group, a community capitals inventory, and quantitative data collection. Our topic built off a project two of us had worked on the previous semester on the movement to end cash bail in Ohio. This time, we focused on disabled people impacted directly by detainment in the criminal legal system in Southwest Ohio.
It was A LOT of work! But we challenged each other and pushed through to create a product we were proud to share with participants in hopes that it could benefit them. It is shared here with a notice that due to agreements with some of the participants and ethical concerns, we have abbreviated or redacted some of our assessment for sharing beyond the classroom and with selected participants.
Disabled & Detained in Southwest Ohio Community Assessment Report (Google Doc)
Disabled & Detained in Southwest Ohio Presentation (Google Slides):
joi chadwick 
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