From Hood 2 Woods: Centering BIPOC Youth Voices in Participatory Dissemination Through Photovoice and Community Events

While Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) and decolonial frameworks are increasingly applied to research design and analysis, their systematic integration into dissemination remains underexplored. The H2W research, informed by a Curandera’s (ancestral healing specialist) leadership in framework education and cultural grounding, was disseminated through a community event at San Francisco State University (SFSU) collaboratively planned and implemented by a Community Advisory Team (CAT) of BIPOC transitional-age youth (ages 18-26). The project investigated how anti-racist green spaces promote healing among Black, Latinx, and Pilipinx youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. We demonstrate how specific practices—providing photo credit instead of anonymity, using audio QR codes to preserve participants’ voices, displaying images on traditional cultural textiles, implementing land reflections, centering participant panels, and sharing power through rotated CAT facilitation—were systematically integrated across dissemination planning and implementation to challenge extractive academic dissemination norms while positioning BIPOC youth as primary authorities in knowledge production. The paper provides concrete examples of principle-based decision-making at each stage of dissemination planning and implementation, while honestly examining where participatory ideals encountered institutional barriers, illustrating how participatory dissemination can fundamentally shift who holds authority to produce and mobilize knowledge in ways that either reproduce or disrupt health inequities rooted in systemic racism.