Minnesota Education Equity Partnership CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

Promise to Act Advisory meetings: The grant allowed for us to have monthly meetings with community leaders, law enforcement leaders, local city officials, educators and youth and parents of color—this committee we call a “Promise to Act advisory group”, they meet to learn key terminologies on education equity, case studies related to community engagement, and the best practices in developing a local Equity Action Plan. This activity was important because it built the support and provided strategy for the community visioning process we engaged in as well, to gather families and students of color input on education equity strategy development. Altogether, the Promise to Act advisory is instrumental in the development of the final Equity Action Plan of a rural community in this civic engagement model.

Community Visioning Sessions in 5 languages and multilingual translation, outreach of the Education Equity Action Plan:
The community visioning sessions held in 5 languages – Karen, Laos, Spanish, East and West African languages were vital to the equity action planning process. Each of the community visioning sessions did an overview of the project and asked key questions related to education equity in the region–in particular, what families and students envisioned for a system focused on education equity, and what current barriers existed in the school community in order to reach that vision. This was a vital component because it provided ideas from the community (especially families) directly for the contents of the Equity Action Plan that now highlights equity strategies for this community. We translated the Equity Action Plan into Spanish, Oromo, and Karen; also a critical step in reaching out to communities in their languages with their vision of education equity for the local schools.

The Strategies Retreat was an important activity in this equity action planning process. The Retreat was an all-day event whereby 25-30 students, community leaders, educators and political leaders learned and dialogued side-by-side to understand the results of the visioning sessions and to collectively complete a root-cause analysis to understand potential equity strategy along the entire PK to college continuum. This activity assists in community-building and co-owning of education equity recommendations for this community.

Key lessons learned

We continue to learn that this concept of “Equity Action Planning” – centering community voices- in school education equity policy and practice is innovative and critical. As demographics continue to shift across rural Minnesota, across all of Minnesota and nationwide– education systems must transform to address these new education challenges and opportunities. Equity Action Plans are important tools to assist in this wide spread transformation and revitalization of our democracy with a multiracial, multilingual community.

A key lesson learned is that along with an equity action planning process of learning and building towards a Plan, there are key relationships with school leaders and influencers that should not be underestimated and need to be thoughtfully considered in the process. In our first equity action planning process, there was strong community leadership to keep school leaders and board members in the process and into the implementation phase with board leaders. In this second community, certain dynamics made for limited continual involvement by school leaders – so that pressure for them to stay engaged should have been ensured with more relationship-building and one to one time engaging them on their specific interest and needs from the project.

Reflections on the community innovation process

All three elements are very important in making progress in the work. For an equity action planning process, inclusivity of the families and students that have been historically marginalized is critical. Being collaborative, we are able to communicate those new ideas and analysis to partners that share ownership and leadership over schools, cities, etc..for change. And being resourceful means reflecting what already exists in the community to build upon those assets (respect of cultural diversity, current parent engagement, etc..)

Other key elements of Community Innovation

The best way we can describe what is “not included” is the element of “knowing the history of race equity” in the community. We are learning that understanding the context of a community, what issues have occurred around race equity and its impact on various communities, must be there in order to address disparities and find community-driven solutions for remedies.

Progress toward an innovation

There was incredible progress in speaking to cultural communities – in their languages – to uncover solutions to the opportunity gap in education. This is directly the definition of addressing a community need that is more effective than existing approaches which have been widening gaps in education.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

What’s next?

We extended the direct implementation of the Nobles County Equity Action Plan with a period of community outreach events, this means translated copies of the Plan and outreach events will garner more community support. There have been some context shifts in the community since we started the grant and now at the end of the grant. Therefore, we want to build the foundation for a “refresh” of an Advisory group carrying the Plan and recommendations forward into the 2018-2019 school year and beyond. We look forward to updating our funders on these developments.

If you could do it all over again…

Another key lesson has been doing “organizing” work alongside the completion of an Equity Action Plan. To get at the “political” aspects of implementation, key decision-makers in rural communities must be attended to and well-informed throughout the process. Informing school board leaders, local Mayors or community college leadership, allows for more political capital in the long-run to implement their Equity Action Plans.