Achieving Greater Educational Equity through Family and Community Engagement: The Power and Story of Trust-Based and Reflexive Partnerships

Abstract Information: Research shows that successful school-family-community partnerships can “improve school programs and school climate, provide family services and support, increase parents’ skills and leadership, connect families with others in the school and in the community, and help teachers with their work” (Epstein et al., 2018, p. 20). Since 2014, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving has engaged in trust-based responsive grantmaking with the six Alliance District Offices of Family, School, and Community Partnership (OFSCPs) to promote student well-being, learning, and success in each school district. The Foundation also sees its partnerships with the OFSCPs as vehicles to address disparities related to race, place, and income in these six public school districts and communities. Furthermore, the Foundation strategically invested in a learning, evaluation, and technical assistance partner, Creative Research Solutions (CRS), to increase the districts’ capacity in evaluative thinking, measurement, and data to help districts track their progress and demonstrate impact. The ultimate goal for the OFSCPs is to become a sustainable, integral part of the fabric of each respective school district as well as the broader network of collaborators and partners at the local, state, and national levels. This session, led by representatives from the Foundation, the school districts, and CRS, will showcase the story of the evolution and success of this initiative from their own vantage points. For example, perspectives gained from the District representatives will detail how the evaluation captured Districts shifting from using a disparity lens to a more equity-based lens in their work. Through technical assistance provided by the evaluation partner, District leaders were able to champion data-driven decision-making to inform the work of OFSCPs. -The Foundation representatives will share how they used trust-based and flexible grantmaking processes to allow Districts to progress at their own pace in building and expanding their OFSCP, based on each District’s capacity and resources. The Foundation will also exemplify its own equity journey by demonstrating how its focus on learning led to a change in how terms such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, as core tenets of the Foundation’s work, were defined and used. -The evaluation partner will share how their culturally responsive and equitable approach to evaluation helped everyone take the necessary pause points to be responsive to the changing needs and dynamics of the initiative and the partnership. They will also describe how a mixed methods evaluation approach allowed them to piece together a nuanced story of each District’s work and identify the common key ingredients (i.e., long-term funding, leadership buy-in, staff capacity) across Districts that are central to making this initiative successful and sustainable. The evaluation team will also underscore how the one-on-one and group learning and evaluation support was irreplaceable in terms of helping the Districts realize the importance of evaluative thinking, using and leveraging their own data, and networking to achieve greater education equity in their districts.

Relevance Statement: The collaborative relationships between the Foundation, the school districts, and the evaluation partner demonstrate how responsive and equitable evaluation principles can be incorporated into evaluative support and grantmaking to advance equity work. The paper will illustrate how partnership, transparency, and responsive evaluative support can pivot work to a more flexible, supportive approach that challenges the orthodoxies of the foundation as the primary user of evaluation and definer of success (Evans, Siesfeld, & Kasper. “Challenging Orthodoxies.” Deloitte). Through a discussion of practice and implementation, the paper will explore how evaluative work should be in service to and advance progress toward equity. Additionally, the paper will explore how partnership and evaluative support can strive to be multi-culturally valid, trust-based, and oriented toward participant ownership. To engage with these themes, the paper will draw upon the Equitable Evaluation Framework (EEI 2022) principles, and therefore add to a body of work at the nexus of theory and practice that speaks to challenging philanthropic orthodoxies. The paper will discuss implications and promising practices for responsive grant-making and how the partners worked together to create peer-sharing environments, respond to technical assistance needs, and create evaluative supports to meet the needs of districts. This case study, coming from the philanthropic sector and within the context of family and community engagement within the education sector, will add to discussions on evaluation's effect on an ongoing educational equity initiative.