Joining Together to Create a Bold Vision for Next Generation Family Engagement

“This challenge paper starts with a brief overview of what we have learned over the past 50 years of family engagement research, practice, and policy, and a look at how this work has guided the challenge we have laid out. We go on to suggest key design principles and processes for building next generation family …

Family Engagement Matters

Students do better in school and in life when their families are engaged. A strong body of evidence is clear that family engagement, from birth through adolescence, contributes to a range of positive student outcomes.

Systems Change and Parent Power

“Systems Change is Education Philanthropy’s Only Exit Strategy: And Parent Power is What Will Change Systems” – Alex Cortez, New Profit Philanthropy will never transform education systems until it transforms its own relationships with parents and communities, and then supports them in exercising their innate power to change policies, practices and resource flows in education. …

Forward Together: Building a Field that Works for Families.

The coronavirus pandemic revealed the necessity, the complexity, and the tremendous value of building strong ties between schools and families. To ensure continuity of learning, schools were forced to rely heavily on families and caregivers to support learning in the home.

Walking Together: A Practical Guide for Strengthening Partnerships Between Schools, Families, and Communities.

Imagine this: A community comes together to set a vision for its public schools. In local libraries, neighborhood associations, school cafeterias, and places of worship, families sit down together and share their hopes and dreams for their children. They think about what schools need to do to better equip students for college, career, entrepreneurship, and …

Dismantling Adultism Toolkit: How to Build & Maintain a Youth-Centered Organization

This toolkit was designed by youth leaders in New Orleans, LA, to present actionable strategies for organizations to elevate youth voices. The toolkit includes an organizational assessment tool, scorecard, and action template for organizations and districts to understand their own progress toward elevating youth voices and make a plan to improve.

Solidarity-Driven Co-Design

In co-design, diverse stakeholders come together in order to collectively identify issues or problems of practice, and to design solutions. Co-design is an iterative process made up of cycles in which people: Build relationships & theorize around shared issues Design and develop tools, practices, processes, and other solutions that push beyond the status quo Enact …

Collaborating to transform and improve education systems: A playbook for family-school engagement. Brookings Institution.

This playbook on family-school collaboration makes the case for why family engagement is essential for education systems transformation and why families and schools must have a shared understanding of what a good quality education looks like. By providing evidence-based strategies from around the world and other hands-on tools that school leaders and partners can adopt …

A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family–School Partnerships

Based on existing research and best practices, the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships (Version 2) is designed to support the development of family engagement strategies, policies, and programs. It is not a blueprint for engagement initiatives, which must be designed to fit the particular contexts in which they are carried out. Instead, the Framework …

Added to Action Planning Tool

Check out the Resource Library

Our online library has hundreds of practitioner-friendly resources to support putting evidence into practice.