Rooted Partnerships: Identifying Community Assets & Funds of Knowledge

This session centers community culture, language, and lived experience as the foundation of effective partnerships. Participants learn how to identify and leverage families’ and community organizations’ funds of knowledge through asset mapping, listening sessions, and dialogue protocols. Leaders will explore how grounding partnerships in local strengths creates more relevant learning opportunities, strengthens trust, and ensures community-based learning reflects the identities and aspirations of students and families.

From Voice to Influence: Designing Shared Decision-Making Structures

This session focuses on moving beyond advisory input toward authentic shared decision-making. Participants examine governance structures, advisory councils, and leadership teams to assess how family and community voice translates into influence over priorities, policies, and practices.

Innovation Through Partnership: Co-Creating Solutions to Community-Identified Needs

Participants learn how to center community-identified challenges as the starting point for innovation. This session explores how partnerships can generate responsive academic, social, and wellness solutions through collaborative inquiry, prototyping, and feedback.

Building Leadership Pipelines for Partnership Sustainability

This session examines how leadership development and succession planning support sustainable community-based partnerships. Participants explore strategies for cultivating shared leadership among administrators, educators, families, and community partners.

Building Psychological Safety & Trust Across Difference

This session treats trust as a system condition rather than an individual trait. Participants explore how historical relationships, language dominance, and institutional power shape family engagement and learn relational repair strategies that rebuild trust across difference.

From Deficit Narratives to Equity-Centered Engagement

Participants examine how deficit beliefs shape engagement practices and outcomes. The session emphasizes shifting responsibility to systems by identifying and dismantling policies and assumptions that create inequitable engagement.

From Transactional Engagement to Co-Creation

Participants redesign engagement structures using participatory design processes that redistribute power, clarify roles, and establish shared accountability between families and schools.

Building Engagement That Survives Turnover & Change

Participants explore strategies that ensure family engagement remains strong despite leadership changes, staff turnover, or shifting policy contexts.

Reframing Leadership: From Authority to Shared Power

Rethink leadership as a practice of shared power that centers community decision-making. Participants examine how traditional leadership concentrates authority and explore how Community Schools require leaders to intentionally redistribute power. Through reflection and power mapping, leaders identify concrete opportunities to shift decision-making to families and community partners.

Interrupting Bias in Leadership Decisions

Address how bias shapes leadership decisions and outcomes. This session supports leaders in recognizing how implicit bias and deficit narratives influence decisions. Participants practice equity pauses and structured reflection to interrupt bias in real time.

Shared Decision-Making in Practice: Models & Tools

Turn shared decision-making from theory into daily practice. Leaders practice concrete tools for shared governance, navigating disagreement, and ensuring collective accountability in decision-making processes.