Tying it Together: Education-Focused Community Change Initiatives

Policymakers make many demands of our schools to produce academic success. At the same time, community organizations, government agencies, faith-based institutions, and other groups often are providing support to students and their families, especially those from high-poverty backgrounds, that are meant to impact education but are often insufficient, uncoordinated, or redundant. In many cases, these institutions lack access to schools and school leaders. What’s missing from the dominant education reform discourse is a coordinated education-focused approach that mobilizes community assets to effectively improve academic and developmental outcomes for students. This study explores how education-focused comprehensive community change initiatives (CCIs) that utilize a partnership approach are organized and sustained. In this study, I examine three research questions: 1. Why and how do school system-level community change initiative (CCI) partnerships form? 2. What are the organizational, financial, and political structures that support sustainable CCIs? What, in particular, are their connections to the school systems they seek to impact? 3. What are the leadership functions and structures found within CCIs? How are leadership functions distributed across schools and agencies within communities? To answer these questions, I used a cross-case study approach that employed a secondary data analysis of data that were collected as part of a larger research study sponsored by a national organization. The original study design included site visits and extended interviews with educators, community leaders and practitioners about community school initiatives, one type of CCI. This study demonstrates that characteristics of sustained education-focused CCIs include leaders that are critical to starting the CCIs and are willing to collaborate across institutions, a focus on community problems, building on previous efforts, strategies to improve service delivery, a focus on education and schools in particular, organizational arrangements that create shared leadership and ownership for the CCI, an intermediary to support the initial vision and collaborative leadership groups, diversified funding approaches, and political support. These findings add to the literature about the growing number of education-focused CCIs. The study’s primary recommendation—that institutions need to work across boundaries in order to sustain CCIs organizationally, financially, and politically—can help policymakers as they develop new collaborative approaches to achieving educational goals.

“Never Give up:” The Strengths and Strategies Used Among Undocumented College Students From Central America to Access and Persist in U.S. Higher Education

The purpose of this study was to identify the strengths and strategies that undocumented college students from Central America used to access and persist in United States higher education. A multiple-case study design was used to conduct in-depth, semi-structured interviews and document collection from ten persons residing in Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, and Washington. Yosso’s (2005, 2006) community cultural wealth conceptual framework, an analytical and methodological tool, was used to uncover assets used to navigate the higher education system. The findings revealed that participants activated all forms of capital, with cultural capital being the least activated yet necessary, to access and persist in college. Participants also activated most forms of capital together or consecutively in order to attain financial resources, information and social networks that facilitated college access. Participants successfully persisted because they continued to activate forms of capital, displayed a high sense of agency, and managed to sustain college educational goals despite challenges and other external factors. The relationships among forms of capital and federal, state, and institutional policy contexts, which positively influenced both college access and persistence were not illustrated in Yosso’s (2005, 2006) community cultural wealth framework. Therefore, this study presents a modified community cultural wealth framework, which includes these intersections and contexts. In the spirit of Latina/o critical race theory (LatCrit) and critical race theory (CRT), the participants share with other undocumented students suggestions on how to succeed in college. This study can contribute to the growing research of undocumented college students, and develop higher education policy and practice that intentionally consider undocumented college students’ strengths to successfully navigate the institution.

BLACK SURVIVAL POLITICS: ORGANIZED MOBILIZATION STRATEGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITIES TO END THE HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC

The purpose of this study is to examine organizational patterns of African American activism in response the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Given their political, economic, and social disenfranchisement, African Americans have historically developed protest and survival strategies to respond to the devaluation of their lives, health, and well-being. While Black protest strategies are typically regarded as oppositional and transformative, Black survival strategies have generally been conceptualized as accepting inequality. In the case of HIV/AIDS, African American religious and non-religious organizations were less likely to deploy protest strategies to ensure the survival and well-being of groups most at risk for HIV/AIDS—such as African American gay men and substance abusers. This study employs a multiple qualitative case study analysis of four African American organizations that were among the early mobilizers to respond to HIV/AIDS in Washington D.C. These organizations include two secular or community-based organizations and two Black churches or faith-based organizations. Given the association of HIV/AIDS with sexual sin and social deviance, I postulated that Black community-based organizations would be more responsive to the HIV/AIDS-related needs and interests of African Americans than their religious counterparts. More specifically, I expected that Black churches would be more conservative (i.e. maintain paternalistic heteronormative sexual standards) than the community-based organizations. Yet findings indicate that the Black churches in this study were more similar than different than the community-based organizations in their strategic responses to HIV/AIDS. Both the community-based organizations and Black churches drew upon three main strategies in ways that politicalize the struggle for Black survival—or what I regard as Black survival politics. First, Black survival strategies for HIV/AIDS include coalition building at the intersection of multiple systems of inequality, as well as on the levels of identity and community. Second, Black survival politics include altering aspects of religious norms and practices related to sex and sexuality. Third, Black survival politics relies on the resources of the government to provide HIV/AIDS related programs and initiatives that are, in large part, based on the gains made from collective action.