3.6 - Community-Driven Planning

  

Community-Driven Planning

Regardless of your district’s community engagement experiences, an aspirational and powerful goal is to implement community-driven planning when possible.

A few considerations for community-driven planning include: 

  • Work with community-based organizations to facilitate and reach a declaration of cooperation - a foundation agreement on the scope and decision-making of a group of powerful partners. 
  • Ensure a key person of group is responsible for follow-through with keeping the core promises you’ve made as a partner with the community. 
  • Integrate ongoing community engagement into budget planning and staffing cycles. 
  • Determine what must or could yield to community planning. Name what’s clear in the scope of the group or body. 
  • Facilitate conditions where different voices, even representing demographically similar communities, can hold and support tension and disagreement with each other.
  • Determine a clear resourcing plan that support the sustainable participation of key community leaders in a way that build relationships and strengthens effectiveness.

As described earlier in this module, it’s important to facilitate conditions where different voices can hold and support tension and disagreement with each other. Creating safer spaces for school personnel and community members to have essential conversations is foundational to community-driven district planning. 

 

Competing Interests

Different community groups will often have competing interests, so it can be both a challenge and an opportunity to develop district planning with those various groups. When balancing community competing interests, consider incremental implementation and scaled response to best mitigate harm and ensure continuous improvement. When funding is limited to answer the requests of multiple focal groups, tiered planning allows for multi year budgetary allocations. 

In order to ensure students, families, and community members know their concerns are taken seriously, it is essential to communicate clearly. If the needs of some focal groups are responded to quickly, perhaps due to a low monetary committment, while another focal group sees their requests unanswered they may feel ignored and further alienated. Continuous communication and purposeful collaboration with stakeholders ensures there is transaprency in planning, budget allocations, and implementation of inclusive initiatives. Lines of communication must remain open until all issues and requests are considered resolved by everyone involved. Due to the evolving nature of school communities, this means lines of communicatoin must always remain open, but the interested individuals and focal groups may shift and change over the years.

There are strategies to help ensure the parameters for engagement are clear to both those who will lead the engagement and those who are engaged.

Strategies:
Spotlight: Cresswell School District uses staff liaisons to meet with focal groups
  • Determine and communicate how the input will be gathered and documented, as well as who will see/read/hear about it.

  • Describe and communicate how the input will inform decision making, how decisions will be made, and how the community groups can continue to know what has transpired.

  • Communicate if/when something becomes a top priority or spending area, what had to be saved for later, and be transparent about why those decisions were made.

 

 

Scaled Approaches to Engagement

Tiered Planning

Your district will likely hear many great ideas for investments and the related financial impact may exceed what you’re able to do in a particular planning cycle. In places where there are competing interests and you’re unable to include all of the ideas elevated by your community, you may want to develop a Tiered Plan.

Tiered Planning is a strategy for navigating long term planning and funding. In this approach, the district can proactively anticipate and consider modifications to their planned activities and expenditures as a result of workforce shortages or other scenarios where initial activities may require adjustment. This is one of the best approaches to avoid having to make significant plan amendments within a year or biennium as it takes into account the important process requirements in planning while offering flexibility based on changing conditions.

When executed well, tiered planning increases the ability of the district to be nimble in moving in their implementation and move quickly to address shifts or gaps in implementation due to unforeseen scenarios. It creates conditions for districts to respond well to change, and maintain focus on the intended outcomes of these investments. For more information on tiered planning, read pages 53 and 54 in the Integrated Guidance.

 From p 53: A plan with community informed alternatives for tiered expenses can help smaller districts minimize process.

 

 

 

 

Equity Lens Tool

To ensure incorporating equity is a continuous process, become familiar with ODE's or the District's Equity Lens Tool. By accessing and utilizing an Equity Lens Tool your district will be able to engage in continual growth and improved inclusion through the equity cycle.

  1. An equity stance: Core values, commitments, orientations, principles, strategies, and frameworks that your district, organization, school, or team has decided are foundational to what you wish to prioritize in decision making.

2. An equity lens: An active tool that supports core values, commitments, orientations, and questions to become operationalizable. An equity lens must support navigating choices in the here and now. It helps translate theory into practice, focuses on assets rather than deficits, and avoids making decisions that could marginalize or harm students, staff, families, and communities. An equity lens could also include:      

     a. Facilitation Tools or Protocols: Possible protocols (such as a consultancy protocol) to use the equity lens in a facilitated space or discussion.     
     b. Decision-making Tools or Protocols: Possible tools (such as the ODE decision tools or consensus tools like Fingers to Five) that help guide decision-making based on the questions and framework in the equity lens.
  1. Implementation: An equity lens should also guide decisions around the roll-out and operationalization of key equity strategies and activities, and can be used throughout the entire process of implementation.

  2. Processes for reflection, feedback, and learning: Throughout the entire cycle and process, teams should consider how reflection, feedback, and learning time and processes are built in to refine the equity stance, lens, and other tools.

 

 

Navigating Community-Driven Planning Activity

Building relationships and trust with community groups takes thoughtful effort and includes responding to the varied community voices. Take some time to complete the Community-Driven Planning Activity Download Community-Driven Planning Activity which will help you practice how to honor community wisdom.

 

After you have completed the planning activity, move on to section 3.7 to wrap up this module!

 

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