About Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership is when interest-holders come together to identify collective priorities (through a needs and assets assessment), it fosters shared focus on those areas deemed most critical by local communities, influences the impact of the strategy, and helps build momentum to sustain efforts over time.
Resources
Collaborative Leadership Guide
Transformational Community Schools are places where power is shared and students, families, educators and community partners are active participants in decision-making. In collaborative leadership, the assets and skillsets of the entire community are uplifted to where all members of the community school are recognized as having agency and collective expertise to transform their schools. The Collaborative Leadership Structures Guide is a co-production of the S-TAC and the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence as part of California’s Community Engagement Initiative.
District Steering Committee Guide
This guide is intended to support interest-holder groups (staff, students, families, and community partners) looking to either establish or strengthen a Local Education Agency (LEA) Community School Steering Committee as a crucial part of collaborative systems and structures in support of a Community School strategy. The document first establishes what is meant by collaborative leadership and structures. It then identifies the purpose, key roles, and recommended steps for building a Community School Steering Committee.
Participatory Systems Change for Equity
The purpose of this guide is to help system leaders facilitate participatory systems change for equity. The guide is based on the idea that meaningful, liberatory, and lasting change is more likely to result when young people, families, community partners, and system leaders work side by side to design and improve child-, youth-, and family-serving systems. This guide describes elements of participatory systems change that institutions and organizations can apply depending on local context and locally defined goals./p>
CEI: Collaborative Leadership Module
Collaborative leadership in community schools is the intentional and systematic shift in power that allows for greater representation and collaboration between all interest holders. This learning module is built collaboratively with and based on publications and findings created by the State Transformational Assistance Center (S-TAC) for California Community Schools.
Open Space: Innovative Approaches to Reconnecting through Community Conversations
Open Space or Open Space Technology is an opportunity to invite participants to co-create and manage their own agenda and sessions focusing on a central theme. Open Space is a participatory facilitation process that involves inviting participants to actively join the sessions that interest them and contribute to the decisions around what topics are on the agenda. During our Community of Practice session, we held conversations asking, “What is the conversation you need to have now about your community?” We then built an agenda around the answers we received.
National Equity Project: Leading for Equity Framework
National Equity Project’s Leading for Equity Framework provides a frame of reference that enables leaders to navigate the complex territory of equity challenges and to develop the capacity to engage in purposeful leadership action. In its simplest form, the Framework helps build habits of mind that are continually in practice. In its more elaborated form, it provides a set of tools, frames and processes that leaders can use in their work./p>
Participatory Budgeting for Organizations
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money.
Storytelling Project Model
The Storytelling Project Model outlines a dialogue framework that can help diverse groups collectively analyze and better understand how racism operates and impacts organizations, communities, and society.
Teacher-Powered Schools: Collaborative Leadership Self-Assessment
The purpose of this self-assessment is to guide team reflection and identify potential areas of growth. We recommend that each team member completes the assessment individually and then discuss it as a team.
Teacher-Powered Practices for Student-Centered Community Schools
Student-centered community schools are intentionally designed to align community partnerships, services, enrichment programs, and classroom learning around students’ strengths, hopes, and dreams. Foundational elements of student-centered community schools are collaborative leadership structures, teacher leadership, collective decision-making processes, and design-thinking. These elements result in collective identity, ownership, and agency of everyone in the school community especially students and families.
Family Engagement Toolkit: Continuous Improvement through an Equity Lens
This toolkit helps districts integrate meaningful family engagement into academic and social-emotional learning goals to improve student outcomes. Grounded in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework, it emphasizes building both educator and family capacity, with a strong focus on equity and inclusion. Designed for district leaders, it offers adaptable strategies, tools, and a continuous improvement process to support effective and equitable family engagement across schools.