Before We Decide for Communities

By M.E. Avila

Decisions about communities are made every day. Officials decide which programs receive funding, where services are located, what gets expanded, what gets cut, and where investments are made. Usually, there is data behind those decisions. We have budgets, needs assessments, performance measures, demographic information, and program outcomes. There should be data. But after years of living and working alongside community, while also working inside institutions making some of these decisions, I keep coming back to another question: Who gets to decide what the data means and what we do about it?

I have been on more than one side of these systems. I have been a young mother raising a family while working, continuing my education, and navigating systems that were not always easy to navigate. Later, I worked alongside community members and frontline workers who often knew exactly where systems were breaking down. I have also worked inside government, managed programs, supervised staff, built partnerships, and reviewed outcomes. Today, I bring a doctoral degree to that work, but the degree did not teach me that communities have knowledge. It gave me additional tools to research, evaluate, document, and communicate what I had already experienced and witnessed.

That is why I am interested in bringing two frameworks into conversations about how officials make decisions: the Community Welfare System, developed by members of Seeds Worth Sowing, and Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, developed by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. They are different frameworks, but together they offer a practical way to think about history, power, resources, community knowledge, and equity before decisions are made.

The Community Welfare System starts with something communities have practiced for generations. People take care of one another. Someone knows who needs groceries. Someone watches the children. Someone has a truck. Someone knows where to find work or which organization to call. Someone checks on an older neighbor. What CWS adds is structure through four pillars: shared leadership, a mutual aid resource pool, operational programs, and organized community participation. In practical terms, it asks whether leadership is shared, whether communities have access to resources, whether the work is sustainable, and whether people are intentionally connected before a crisis rather than assembled after something goes wrong.

Imagine applying those questions before creating another program. Instead of beginning with, “What can we provide this community?” we could ask, “What is already happening here? Who is already doing the work? Who do people trust? What resources already exist? What is missing? Are we strengthening something that works, or spending money recreating it because we never bothered to look?”

TRHT adds another important question: How did we get here? Its framework includes narrative change, racial healing and relationship building, and examination of separation, law, and the economy. Those areas matter because the conditions we see today did not appear overnight. If a neighborhood has fewer resources, poorer infrastructure, less accumulated wealth, worse health outcomes, or fewer economic opportunities, we should not begin by asking what is wrong with the people who live there. We should ask what happened there. What policies shaped those conditions? Where did investment go, and where did it not go? What barriers remain? What stories have we repeatedly told about that community, and have those stories influenced our decisions?

This matters in San Antonio, where neighborhoods carry very different histories of investment and opportunity. But acknowledging inequity does not mean defining communities by what they lack. The same neighborhoods described through poverty, health disparities, or infrastructure needs contain generations of knowledge, cultural strength, small businesses, community health workers and promotoras, educators, organizers, families, churches, and neighbors who have solved problems with limited resources for a very long time. We have to be capable of seeing both.

Together, CWS and TRHT can change the questions we ask before making decisions. What happened here? What already exists? Who holds the knowledge? Who has been carrying the work? Who controls the resources? Who benefits from this decision? Who carries the burden? Most importantly, who actually gets a meaningful say in what happens next?

These questions apply directly to economic development. We can use labor market data to identify growing occupations, fund workforce training, and measure enrollment and completion. But when people do not complete a program, the answer is not automatically more recruitment. Ask why. Maybe childcare is the barrier. Maybe training conflicts with work. Maybe transportation is unreliable. Maybe the credential does not lead to the wage participants expected. The numbers tell us something happened.

People can often tell us why.

The same is true in emergency management. We can tell families to keep several days of food, water, medications, batteries, and emergency supplies on hand. That is good preparedness advice, but it means something very different to a household with disposable income than to a family deciding which bill can wait until payday. CWS asks us to identify the community networks that can strengthen preparedness before disaster strikes. TRHT asks why some neighborhoods may be more vulnerable to disruption and have fewer resources for recovery in the first place.

Then we need to know whether what we did actually worked. This is where San Antonio has an opportunity to connect community knowledge with stronger evaluation. St. Mary’s University offers a Community Based Assessment and Evaluation certificate focused on culturally responsive evaluation and understanding impact through qualitative and quantitative information. Partnerships among universities, community organizations, nonprofits, residents, and government could help connect lived experience to measurable outcomes while building local capacity to evaluate what is working and what is not.

I am not interested in choosing between lived experience and data. I want better data because we included lived experience. A spreadsheet can tell us participation declined. People may tell us why. Program data can tell us where money was spent. Residents can tell us whether what was funded was useful. Community members can help us ask better questions. Evaluators can help us test what we think we know. Frontline workers can help us understand what happens between policy and practice.

Data can show whether those experiences represent a larger pattern.

Equity does not mean every program should continue forever or that difficult decisions should be avoided. Sometimes programs need to change. Sometimes work is duplicated. Sometimes resources should move. Sometimes something simply is not working. But before making those decisions, we should understand the history, know what already exists, listen to the people doing and receiving the work, follow the data, and be willing to measure what happens afterward.

We have tremendous expertise in San Antonio. It exists in universities, government offices, nonprofits, and businesses. It also exists at kitchen tables, neighborhood meetings, churches, community centers, and among the people doing frontline work every day. The challenge is deciding whose expertise counts when power is exercised.

TRHT can help us understand how we got here. Community Welfare Systems can help us think differently about leadership, resources, participation, and what communities can build and sustain. Community based assessment and evaluation can help us determine whether the decisions we make actually improve people's lives.

None of these approaches eliminates difficult decisions. They help us make better ones.

Maybe the goal should not be getting better at making decisions for communities. It should be getting better at making decisions with them.