Voter Education and Mobilization

Since 2020, we have invested in parent and caregiver fellows at schools serving Atlanta Public School students. In the summer of 2021, we onboarded a director of public engagement and advocacy to grow the program and support the development of more K-12 public education advocates. This timing was critical for Atlantans, with the mayoral, city council, and Atlanta Board of Education elections scheduled for the fall. The 2021 Atlanta Board of Education race was highly significant since it was the last time all seats were on the ballot at once before staggered elections went into effect.

Under the direction of the director of public engagement and advocacy, we conducted voter registration and mobilization training with parents and caregivers, who then activated their children’s school communities. The program promotes organizing principles and supports parents and caregivers in understanding how elected officials’ jobs impact their day-to-day lives, especially their children’s educational experiences. The program has supported up to 20 fellows annually and grown our network of people across the district working to amplify civic engagement for K-12 public school education. In addition, redefinED atlanta has run get-out-the-vote campaigns since 2020. Through digital campaigns, we amplify key election dates, provide a central website to check voter status and motivate site visitors to create a voting plan, including voting down the ballot. We believe that when families vote and remain engaged beyond election cycles, K-12 public schools will serve the needs of every student.

Families have power, and we are leveraging resources and relationships to support Atlanta Public Schools in being the best they can be.

Education Community Convening

We have facilitated quarterly convenings for more than 20 local education non-profit organizations since the start of 2020. With the onset of the pandemic, many participants expressed a greater sense of responsibility to work collectively in serving the expanding needs of children in Atlanta Public Schools. The Atlanta Board of Education’s introduction of a policy known as Goals and Guardrails in the spring of 2021 catalyzed the collaborative to grow into a working coalition. After the policy passed in October 2021, the collaborative’s participating organizations initiated efforts to formalize their partnership and announce the coalition and its focus during the 2022-2023 school year.

To advance our mission, we will grow partnerships, collaborate across issue areas and organize for collective action. We are pooling expertise and resources to be proactive and responsive as K-12 public education continues navigating the pandemic’s impact on children and schools.

Atlanta Reimagining and Innovating for Schools Everywhere (ARISE) Fellowship

We gathered valuable insights from public education stakeholders during our response to COVID-19. The prevailing sentiment was a request for help identifying where individuals could get engaged in supporting public education. With varying resources, time and interest areas among inquiring stakeholders, we turned to our education community to help co-design a learning experience that would address how individuals could get involved in supporting children and schools. From historical context about public education, Atlanta Public Schools and student performance data to mentorship, community listening and engagement, and participatory grantmaking, we developed the ARISE Fellowship.

Over 2021, we partnered with five community organizations serving families and community members in Atlanta, bringing a specialty lens to the co-design process. EdConnect and Fathers Incorporated work directly with parents and caregivers in and out of schools. Goodie Nation supports edpreneurs and offered experience with incubator and accelerator fellowship program design. Next Generation Men and Women serves students and TeachX’s work spans teachers and students. With our added funder lens, we designed a nine-month fellowship that aims to grow community power and influence by exploring the levers that drive systemic change for all of Atlanta’s children.

In 2022, we launched the pilot with 11 fellows representing every cluster in Atlanta Public Schools. We look forward to reporting on their impact and our learnings in 2023.

CCRPI data and apply what they’ve read to their child’s needs. Moreover, what resounded was that parents and caregivers wanted to support schools in serving their children and others.

In 2021, we took the insights we’d gathered, consulted with data analysts and embarked on developing a tool to create a family-friendly way to understand publicly available data about schools, highlighting the core categories of interest to parents and caregivers.

We completed the Atlanta Schools Data Project website in January 2022 and are broadening our feedback loop to extend beyond groups that informed the tool’s development. In this phase of the tool’s development, we are engaging various education stakeholders, and we secured a third-party entity to conduct qualitative feedback regarding the resource.

Atlanta School Data Project

Since our founding year, parents’ and caregivers’ stories have informed our work. We’ve heard their challenges when seeking the best school for their child’s needs. The underlying sentiment of most conversations was the desire for their children to thrive in school and beyond. For families researching available schools for their children, we’ve heard questions about how to read

We will identify trends and apply the input to the Atlanta Schools Data Project website before officially launching it during the 2023-2024 school year.