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Generating Dialogue

Our intent is to support and encourage your efforts at generating dialogue in your local community. We offer both an invitation and a process that we hope you find useful for beginning a Mendez and Brown dialogue in your community to cultivate organizational change in schools. These conversations will require personal commitment, trust, and courage to reach out, set aside our differences, and discover what is important for the future of our children as we co-create a blueprint for action.

 


About this Guide

The guide is organized into three sections:

  • Getting Ready
  • Hosting Your Community Event
  • Maximizing the Momentum

Each section is vital to creating your community’s blueprint for action. In each section, you will find the most important steps for helping you and other community leaders assemble the best ideas to engineer real transformation in your neighborhood schools.

This guide provides components of a framework to help you create a productive space for dialogue and planning. These components have been identified and proven over the course of our work throughout many states. The framework is flexible, so make it work best for you. There is no single way or one-size-fits all prescription for every community. It is precisely within our diversity that our strengths resonate. Each group of community leaders must bring their diverse voices, energy and spirit to envision and create the educational change that is best for their local context. We hope this chorus for change will be made up of many community voices, exercising their individual and collective gifts to their fullest, acting together to create schools that work for all children.

We invite you to take these steps and remember that IDRA is committed to working with you. Along with this guide, please use our additional resources available online.

We ask that you share your ideas and planning through our community web site so others in similar communities also can host successful dialogues. This password-protected web site is designed for communities that are planning or have already held a community dialogue about education. To get access to the web site, let IDRA know of your plans (210-444-710), and we will send you an e-mail invitation.

Thank you for your commitment and your dedication to making a difference for children. We look forward to hearing from you. Together, schools, families and communities can make their blueprint a reality so that all students regardless of their race or ethnicity, income or language have excellent support and opportunities for success.