We Made a Promise: School-Community Collaboration, Leadership, and Transformation at Promesa Boyle Heights

Promesa Boyle Heights, a neighborhood-level collaborative in Los Angeles, works to deliberately develop relationships, coordination, and alignment across multiple partners to benefit young people and families--with positive, measurable results. One unique aspect of Promesa is the substantive engagement of parents, youth, and residents as key stakeholders, decision-makers, and owners of the work. This engagement is too often missing in collaborative education and collective impact efforts, but lays crucial groundwork for ongoing support, sustainability, and success. This study by Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University (AISR), with support from the Ford Foundation, was conducted with the hope that an exploration of the processes, structures, and belief systems of Promesa Boyle Heights, as well as the lessons learned by the collaborative, would be of value to those working to foster meaningful collaboration across the educational ecosystem. The following are appended: (1) Methods; (2) Promesa Governance and Staffing Structure; (3) Promesa Impacts; (4) Promesa Partners and Schools; and (5) Community Schools Background. [For the Executive Summary, see ED574742.]