Enabling “barrio” innovation: a grassroots approach for centering community initiatives in just sustainability transformations

Sustainability transformations are most meaningful when communities take ownership of their collective futures and guide transformative processes that are rooted in their local traditions and value systems. Yet, researcher–community collaborations aimed at facilitating meaningful transformations can fall short of their objectives if they do not explicitly recognize bottom-up transformative processes that already exist in the community that enable grassroots ways of knowing and addressing sustainability challenges prevalent in the community. This paper addresses this gap in researcher–community partnerships by illustrating a transdisciplinary collaboration that emerged among researchers, educators, and advocates in South Phoenix, Arizona that sought to center recognitional and epistemic justice from the start. These collaborations led to the co-designing and execution of school curriculums in three learning centers in South Phoenix aimed at developing researcher capabilities among learners for exploring the pasts, presents, and futures, and contributing to transformative action in their community. This paper outlines the approaches that this group of collaborators, who are all co-authors in the paper, took toward forming reciprocal relationships and facilitating just transformations in the community. First, we describe our collaboration process, which was mindful of activating existing spaces of community leadership as well as cultivating spaces of reciprocal knowledge exchange and reflection among the collaborators. Next, we outline our approach toward facilitating just transformations, which we call “barrio” innovation, which is based on principles of embracing a mindframe of abundance, enabling transformative pathways, and focusing on the micro-scale. We further illustrate, through case studies, how our approaches to collaborations and transformations manifested in different learning centers and with different collaborators in South Phoenix. We conclude with our collective reflections and the practices that worked for us toward facilitating just transformations through meaningful researcher–community collaborations.