Enlisting Key Community Members
Overview
In this step, the school design team maps their community ecosystem and identifies an initial set of community members (think community leaders, nonprofits and businesses, elected officials, and school board members) whose support is essential to secure before publicly committing to the design journey. Next, the school design team creates a plan to engage these community members and begin outreach.
Goal
Secure critical support needed for high school transformation leading up to the public announcement
Owner(s)
School design team
Contributor(s)
School leadership
Why Community Engagement Matters
Community is at the heart of high school transformation. Engaging the community is at the heart of the design journey.
Enlisting key community members is an essential step in the design journey of a new or redesigned school. It involves tapping into the wealth of resources within the community to build buy-in and secure the endorsement and dedication of these individuals and groups toward high school transformation. Moreover, community engagement cultivates a shared sense of ownership—an essential factor in driving meaningful, scalable, and sustainable transformation.
As schools embark on the design journey, one fundamental question to consider is, “What can we accomplish together with our community to ensure the success of our design journey?” Understanding the potential of community involvement is a key factor in a successful new school or school redesign. Community involvement might mean forging partnerships with nonprofit service providers or afterschool programs or cultivating relationships with civic leaders who can advocate for the school on policy issues.
[Expanding the Definition of Engagement graphic and copy]
In the next phase, the school design team explores this new approach to community engagement more deeply, examining different frameworks teams can use to determine target audiences and different approaches to catalyze the necessary contributions from each group. They also learn different methodologies for how to “push” and “pull” audiences through distinct messaging approaches.
The intention in this step is to set the groundwork for community engagement by starting to understand the broader community and identify the community members who will need to be brought onboard most urgently.