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Parent Leadership and Organizing for Justice Report

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Image captures a family reading a book together. Two parents are seated on the floor with their elementary school aged child between them. Both the mother and father assist the child in reading  a book. The father wears blue shirt, while the mother wears a yellow sweater.

Parent Leadership and Organizing for Justice: A Landscape Analysis

Seeking to create greater opportunities for their children and families, many parents and caregivers join initiatives to expand their capacity to be community leaders, organizers, and advocates. Through leadership and organizing, parents fight for justice on key issues their families face—lack of access to quality early childhood education, substandard schools, toxic environments, poor health services, crowded and dilapidated housing, and limited opportunities for personal and economic development. A robust literature documents the many ways these groups make a difference. They bolster the confidence, mental health, civic engagement, and networks of parent leaders (and their families) and build sustainable power for much needed systemic change.

Yet, there is limited knowledge about the span and range of parent leadership and organizing groups across the U.S., which have tremendous potential to lead to such widespread social change. Although our research team has decades of combined community-engaged research experience alongside parent leadership and organizing groups, at the start of this project unanswered questions remained: How many parent leadership organizations are there? Where are they located? How do they support parents? Who are parent leaders? What issues do they work on? What makes parent leadership organizations distinct from other leadership development or community organizing groups?

What results do they achieve? And last, how might the children of parent leaders benefit from these groups? The Parent Power and Leadership Survey begins to answer these questions. This report shares findings from the first ever landscape analysis of parent leadership organizations across the U.S., including a survey and five focus groups with parent leaders, staff, and members of the philanthropic community. We explore two main questions:

  1. What is the landscape (i.e. geographic scope, spread, aim, and content) of parent leadership and organizing groups throughout the United States?
  2. In what ways and to what extent do these initiatives engage the children of parent leaders? We focus on parent leadership and organizing groups that develop leadership skills and knowledge to work collectively toward racial, social, or economic justice.
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Parent leaders have shared countless powerful stories about how their children have benefited from their leadership and community organizing. We have heard how children gain the confidence, knowledge, and skills to also fight for social, economic, and racial justice; how children thrive when they are surrounded by a community of powerful and loving adult supporters and mentors; and how parent organizers often feel greater pride in their racial identity, their immigration history, and their languages — and share this pride with their children. Yet, there has been little systematic research on parent leadership and organizing groups nationwide, particularly how they engage the children of parent leaders.

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Executive Summary

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

This Parent Power and Leadership Survey findings report focuses on parent leadership initiatives that develop leadership skills and knowledge to work collectively toward racial, social, or economic justice.

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Introduction

Seeking to create greater opportunities for their children and families, many parents and caregivers join initiatives to expand their capacity to be community leaders, organizers, and advocates.

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Defining Parent Leadership and Organizing

In this study, we focus on parent leadership and organizing that seek to advance social, racial, and economic justice. This section outlines key definitions, developed at the start of the study with the help of 27 collaborators including parent leaders, staff of leadership and organizing groups and funders.



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Methods

To inform survey development and how the results should be used, we conducted focus groups and interviews with parent leaders, staff from parent leadership and organizing groups, and funders who support these groups across the country.

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Findings Section I: Survey Results

This section illustrates organizations’ key issue areas, geography, and demographics.

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Findings Section II: How Do Parent Leadership Organizations Engage the Children of Parent Leaders?

This section reports on how parent leadership organizations engage the children of parent leaders, as well as the organizations’ desires for engaging youth more, and barriers to doing so.

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Implications for Practice, Policy, Philanthropy

This landscape analysis shows that parent leadership groups are widespread throughout the U.S., in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. They range in scope from neighborhood-based to national.

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Directions for Future Research

The goal of this report was to share a snapshot of parent leadership organizations across the U.S. In future analysis of the survey data, we can explore relationships such as the relationship between funding and engagement of children.

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References

References for Parent Leadership and Organizing for Justice Report

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Appendix A: Contributors

This Parent Power and Leadership Survey findings report focuses on parent leadership initiatives that develop leadership skills and knowledge to work collectively toward racial, social, or economic justice.

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Appendix B: Methods

In summer 2021, we conducted five focus groups with parent leaders, staff from organizations focused on parent leadership and family engagement more broadly, and supporters of parent leadership who work at philanthropic organizations. We also conducted one-on-one interviews with two people who could not attend the focus groups. In total, we spoke to 27 people.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all of the parent leaders, staff, and philanthropic leaders (see Appendix) who participated in focus groups and one-on-one interviews and who helped us to create the Parent Power and Leadership Survey. We especially thank the parent leadership organizations that completed the survey. We also thank Skky Martin and Lillian Platten for their research assistance and Dr. Mark Warren for his thought partnership. We greatly appreciate Dr. Fabienne Doucet, Kate Gill Kressley, and Anne Henderson for their stellar editing of this report. Finally, we thank the Spencer Foundation for their generous support.
 

About Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools

NYU Metro Center advances equity and excellence in education by connecting to legacies of justice work through critical inquiry and research, professional development and technical assistance, community action and collaboration. NYU Metro Center is nationally and internationally renowned for its work on educational equity and school improvement. It brings together scholars, educators, and innovators from diverse backgrounds to collaborate on a range of projects to strengthen and improve access, opportunity, and educational quality across varied settings, but particularly in striving communities.
 

About the Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation

The mission of the Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation (PRE) at NYU Metro Center is to make research and evaluation for education that is action-oriented, liberating, accessible and results in more equitable systems, policies, and practices.
 

About Community Change

Community Change builds the power of low-income people, especially people of color, to win changes on the issues that impact their lives. By fusing the power of organizing, ideas, and politics, we fuel bold and enduring movements that win big. Since its founding in 1968, we have built the power and capacity of people most marginalized by injustice — especially people of color, women, immigrants, people struggling to make ends meet — to change the structures and systems that perpetuate injustice. Throughout the past five decades, Community Change has focused on strengthening the field of community organizing, working with hundreds of grassroots groups and training thousands of grassroots leaders. We have pioneered new methods to bring grassroots leaders into civic life by nurturing emerging social movements, bringing community organizing into large-scale voter turnout programs, and launching national issue campaigns.

Suggested Citation

Geller, J.D., Cossyleon, J.E, Foster, P., McAlister, S., & Perez, W.Y. (2023). Parent Power and Leadership for Justice: A Landscape Analysis. Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools at New York University.
 

Authors

Joanna D. Geller NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools

Jennifer E. Cossyleon Community Change

Parker Foster NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools 

Sara McAlister NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools

Wendy Y. Perez NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools