Templates and resources to build partnerships with families and communities – a companion guide to the Oregon Department of Education’s Community Engagement Toolkit

Purpose of this publication

• Acknowledge the complexity and messiness of community-driven design while providing simple, easy-to-follow next steps for deepening and strengthening your district’s community engagement strategies.
• Prepare conveners, facilitators and community liaisons in your district to lead authentic conversations that build trust, elevate innovative solutions, and attend to the well-being of your students and community, especially those who have been marginalized or traumatized by public systems.
• Guide the sense-making of complex qualitative data and seamlessly connect it to the construction of your Integrated Plan.

To Northwest Oregon’s school communities:

We are pleased to present a collection of tools that can help cultivate the partnerships that exist in your school district and establish new ones. This is a companion guide to the Oregon Department of Education’s Community Engagement Toolkit, which includes a spectrum of community engagement strategies. With this companion guide, it’s our hope that you and your team will be inspired to engage with your community in new and transformative ways.

The Student Success Act, and thus your Integrated Plan, aims to meet students’ mental and behavioral health needs and increase academic achievement for students who have historically experienced academic disparities. This vision relies fundamentally on authentic community engagement to reimagine an equitable, thriving school system.

This publication will walk you through the purpose- setting, planning, facilitation and data analysis stages of two high-leverage engagement strategies: empathy interviews and story circles. We have also enclosed additional tips for improving existing approaches and ideas for new strategies to try.

As you work to construct your Integrated Plan throughout the 2022-23 school year, you are afforded an exciting—perhaps also daunting—opportunity to rethink how you partner with students, families and other community members to design school programs that meet your communities’ unique needs. Some days it could feel messy and complex, and other days you will be invigorated by the stories that surface during empathy interviews, story circles and in other conversations.

Through it all, what’s most important is that you and your team share a genuine vision for connection, collaboration and partnership that extends beyond the walls of the classroom. Together, we can start to address the challenges brought on by systemic racism, poverty, COVID-19 and the hundreds of other ways we struggle to support the wholeness of students, families, educators and others in our school communities. We look forward to supporting your success in this goal.

In partnership,

Inger McDowell-Hartye, Equity Professional Development Specialist

Sharif Liwaru, Director of Equity and Family Partnerships

Kelsey Soltysiak (Cardwell), Communications Director

Carolina Parente, Spanish Language Interpreter and Translator

Brian Bain, Director of Research, Assessment, and Evaluation