Preparing Parent Leaders To Effectuate Change

by Dr. Mittie Jones, Don Slocum, Jacqueline Gillon, Cheryl Mays and Elise Tompkins

The engagement of parents is often mentioned as a key factor in student academic achievement. Moreover, parents and adult caregivers are usually faced with a myriad of other roles to play as they meet the multiple needs of their children, which may require involvement with social service, juvenile justice, mental health, and physical health systems, to name a few. Fulfilling these roles can be overwhelming for parents and caregivers in this era of rapid change, including government reform, school transformation, and technological advancement.

Parent leadership training provides the tools, resources, and foundation that enable parents and caregivers to recognize their capacity to not only manage the systems they encounter but also to change them and engage others in the process. Too often the access to genuinely influence program and policy outcomes is denied parents who do not have adequate information or the knowhow to obtain and utilize it.

Leadership training for parents who have the desire to be more effective advocates for themselves and their communities is a missing link that the Neighborhood Leadership Institute (NLI) has filled in Cleveland, Ohio. For almost fifteen years, NLI has worked to stimulate and support grassroots leadership that contributes to rebuilding the bonds of community and improving the quality of life for neighborhood residents and families throughout greater Cleveland.

Experienced in the world of grassroots leadership training and support, graduates of NLI leadership programs have taken on school district and public system issues that need the voice of parents as they shape policies that impact parents and families in greater Cleveland. For example, a parent of four children found herself embroiled in a bitter and complicated suburban school strike. She began to organize concerned and frightened parents in her home to provide a place of strategy and voice. Advised by the late Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, she was handed a brochure about the Neighborhood Leadership Institute, and she got connected. Without any financial resources, the Institute began working with the parents by listening to their concerns and guiding them through group exercises that challenged them to communicate and gain consensus in new ways. She joined Neighborhood Leadership Cleveland along with other grassroots leaders in a variety of volunteer leadership roles throughout the community.

The strike was eventually settled. The parent and NLI continued to work together, along with a network of parents and stakeholders, to gain healing among parents, school officials, the city, teacher leadership and the greater community. This courageous parent leader ran for the school board several years later and won. Now the vice-president, she is in her second term and works professionally as a family liaison for another local school district. Everyone learned the importance of meeting parents where they are, listening, and developing strategies to move the parent leaders to where effective advocacy and leadership can take place. NLI creates safe environments for parents to reveal areas where they need to grow and provides civic and socio-economic information so parents can get rooted as the leaders of their families, schools and neighborhood organizations.

Nationally, parent leadership training has emerged in small and large communities to arm emerging and existing parent advocates with tools, networking, intensive training and interventions. In greater Cleveland, NLI has developed the Parents As Leaders Training Academy (PALTA) to recruit, train, guide, mentor and connect parent leaders from Cuyahoga County. Each of the 88 counties in the state of Ohio has its own Family and Children First Council. In Cuyahoga County, the Neighborhood Leadership Institute has prepared parent representatives to interact with large non-profit and governmental agencies and to examine policies that impact families and children.

The curriculum of PALTA helps parents understand how social and economic trends affect families and how to develop a message that can be effectively delivered in front of the school board or the city council or at the statehouse. Parent leaders are challenged to research issues and work collectively to problem-solve and speak collaboratively with one voice.

Just as NLI encourages participants to operate from an asset-based premise. the organization functions similarly. NLI recognizes that parent leaders possess intrinsic personal power but need the affirmation and clarity of a concise leadership training model to achieve their organizational goals. The parent leadership curriculum has evolved over ten years but at its root is research-based and empirically tested. NLI commends the state of Connecticut for introducing a model of leadership training that reaches parent leaders regardless of education, race, gender or income. This principle has been a guiding precept for all NLI leadership programs.