Community Partners Are Indispensable Assets as We Build Forward Together

Katherine Plog Martinez, Consultant

Disruption creates opportunity.
The walls are softened.
There is increased recognition of the role community organizations can play.
American Rescue Plan funding is a once in a lifetime opportunity for partners.

If you’ve been following this blog, attended the Ready by 21 National Meeting, or have heard one of the Readiness Projects coordinating partners speak recently, you’ve heard one or more of these phrases. They are exciting! This moment in time as we come out of a trying year and can begin to envision the future is exciting!

And in some cases, the words cause a pause or even a little sting. “What do we do if the walls aren’t softened in our district?” “What if our community isn’t talking openly about the funding, let alone thinking about how to share it?”

We’ve shared in a previous blog the exciting collaboration underway in Tulsa. As they dig in on the Build Forward Together goals to “Use Summers to Innovate Towards Long-term Change and Strengthen & Leverage Community Partners,” their school district, out-of-school time intermediary, and community partners are thinking together about how they can build back smarter, bolder, and broader. Their work is inspiring and is fully leveraging the moment. But is incredibly important to note that Tulsa has been on this journey for nearly half a decade. The dual pandemics provided both the needed final push and the necessary conditions to make real their vision to become a city of learning, but the community has been building toward this moment of partnership.

If you are in a community where the walls don’t feel softened, if community partners still don’t feel valued, or if it feels like the message is swiftly turning back to academics and test scores, establish your organization (and community partners as a whole) as a strong and indispensable partner!

I don’t know about you, but I’m still exhausted. I can assure school district staff and principals are exhausted too. When a principal finishes their day of visiting classrooms (virtually or in-person), coaching staff, budgeting and planning for next year, thinking about summer programs, responding to concerns from families, addressing in the moment fires and finally cracks open their email. Even if they are eager to bring in programs and supports from community partners, finding 10 e-mails from 10 different partners is daunting, especially when there are 200 other emails to respond to.

Part of establishing your organization as a strong partner will be helping to make sense of this volume. What if instead of 10 emails, that principal got 1 email or phone call (or as in-person becomes more feasible, a scheduled meeting) where a collaborative group of community organizations come together to present one proposal of what they know about the school community, how they can help accomplish goals, and very specific asks of what they need?

Here are three ideas on how to strengthen that collaborative approach and show the value your organization and your partnership can provide:

1. Do your homework to find common ground

The last decade of working on collective impact has shown us that starting with shared goals is critical to success. This does not mean that if the district or school with which you partner is saying their goals is math remediation you need to become expert in math. It does mean that you must find common ground of what you each want for young people and what we know about successful learning and development.

In a recent Partnership for Social Emotional Learning Podcast from the Wallace Foundation, one of our partners shared, “Ultimately, I think that what helps us is that we’re both focused on serving our students. We want what’s best for our students. We have the end goal in mind, and it’s not about each organization when we’re working together.”

Take time to ask district and school leaders what is important to them and share what is important to you. Then, share what you do best that can help support those goals

2. Collaborate & coordinate

Communities across the country stood up learning hubs even where partnerships didn’t exist. We can take the National League of Cities’ recommendation about learning hubs:

“Be intentional about partnering with content-based enrichment organizations to infuse arts, music, STEM, STEAM, sports, outdoor experiences, and other enrichment opportunities into community learning hub programmatic offerings.”

And translate it forward — be intentional about partnering across organizations to create comprehensive offerings that can be offered in partnership with schools.

If your community has an out-of-school time intermediary or partner collaborative, join them! Engage in conversation about how you can be united and aligned.

If your community doesn’t yet have a local intermediary, reach out to your state affiliate of the 50 State Afterschool Network. Learn what they are doing to advocate and lift up provider voices and what resources they might have to help you collaborate in your community.

Or take the reins! Invite the other providers you know for coffee or a zoom meeting and talk. Share ideas. Learn what makes each of you great. Figure out how you can help each other.

3. Establish your community organization as an indispensable asset

Community-based organizations are usually great about talking about core programming. An arts program can describe all the techniques they’ll teach and likely how the art program helps build critical social emotional skills. A sports program can provide details of the teamwork and progression through skills. What community-based programs doesn’t do as often is highlight all the amazing connections they have to community, and all the ways they can help meet the shared goals discussed in idea #1.

To help you frame your organization as an indispensable asset, we’ve created a simple Build Forward Together tool to help you examine and critically assess all that you have to offer. Imagine the collaborative conversation with the school leader if each organization can highlight not just their programming, but how collectively, they can support a wide range of needs of the school, young people, families and communities.

Now is the time to Build Forward Together. While it may not always feel like a given, or be easy, the potential to lift up the work you do best as part of equitable learning and development ecosystems for the young people in your community will be worth the effort.

Visit the Readiness Projects’ Build Forward Together website to find the Framing Your Organization as An Indispensable Asset Tool and other resources to help your community Build Forward Together.