SFC Partnerships Team

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The School-Family-Community Partnerships Team promotes child and youth success by working with schools to build culturally responsive partnerships with families and communities. We do this by:

• Recognizing and valuing strengths
• Aligning school reform with community development and using the community as the context for learning
• Meeting the diverse needs of all cultures (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.)
• Developing community-wide collaborations with shared responsibility
• Including and empowering all youth

In order to show what a successful system to support youth success might look like, we use the metaphor of a healthy forest ecosystem. Young trees will grow healthy when they develop within an environment characterized by plant and animal diversity, healthy soil, and nutrients from the sun, and clean precipitation and air. Each part of the ecosystem has a vital role to play, and each is dependent on the other parts for its health. This is true of our youth: It takes healthy schools, families, and communities to help ensure youth success. Weakness in any part of the system puts our youth at risk. Each part requires the support and collaboration of the others to be effective. We strive to help schools, families, and communities cultivate an ecology of youth success. (The entire Metaphor is also available as a PDF document [8pp., 981K])

We help schools and communities create a shared vision of partnering for the benefit of students and for the development of the community. This vision is realized through a collaborative effort among school staff, students, families, and community members to create successful outcomes for their youth. The effort is multi-faceted involving curricular, policy, fiscal, and social support strategies. Embedded in these strategies is a commitment to creating bridges across cultures, using a strengths-based and empowerment approach, and continuous learning and growth.