UD Rising Community Affinity Group Forums

  • The District worked with the Catalyst Community Conversations (CCC) of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education to facilitate the community dialogues. CCC utilized a process of “intentional listening” and group conversation facilitation to understand what community members want & need, what our shared values & goals are, where we don't understand one another, and how we move forward together. Through the community dialogues, CCC gathered thoughts and feelings about how the School District and the various communities can:

     

    • work together to improve education
    • support the students, families and communities that attend the district
    • ensure that the many, diverse communities feel connected to the school district and feel heard, informed and that they have a “voice” that is listened to and respected

     

    The dialogues also: 

     

    • identified a set of themes/issues that need to be addressed to bring more equity into both the district and township.  These will include key tensions and trade-offs, areas of common ground for action, and overarching themes
    • developed a set of principles to guide the district and township/community in working together to address those themes/issues
    • gave participants an experience of participating in productive civic dialogues that will build trust and engagement and create social capital

     

    The Upper Darby School District wanted to hear from all its community stakeholders throughout this process of building an action-oriented plan for fostering educational excellence with equity for all its schoolchildren. To that effect, four (4) forums were held and conducted virtually via Zoom to build trust and buy-in from four stakeholder groups whose voices we wanted to make sure were represented in the discussions. The forums were followed by three (3) broader community forums and were all facilitated with breakout groups led by experienced dialogue moderators from Community Catalyst Conversations, a unit of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

     

    The forum focus groups and sessions were as follows: 

     

    Focus Group Forum Meeting Dates

     

       Affinity Group

    Thursday, December 10, 2020, 7:00 p.m.

       The African-American/Black Diaspora Community

     

    Tuesday, January 5, 2021, 9:00 a.m.

       The Business Community

     

    Thursday, January 7, 2021, 7:00 p.m.

     

       The Catholic Parish Community

     

    Monday, January 20, 2021, 7:30 p.m.

       

       The Immigrant Community

     

    The three (3) general community forums were 2-hour events and were open to all District residents and anyone else with an authentic stake in the school system as a business owner, taxpayer or employee. 

     

    General Community Forum Meeting Dates

     

    Saturday, February 20, 2021 at 10:00 a.m.

     

    Monday, February 22, 2021 at 7:15 p.m.

     

    Monday, March 1, 2021 at 7:30 p.m.

     

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