BY HILLARY VIDERS
SPECIAL TO NORTHERN VALLEY PRESS
ENGLEWOOD, N.J.—On March 22, The Community Chest hosted its “Activating Community Partnerships for Education” summit at the Dwight Englewood School.
Between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., community leaders discussed how communities can work together to build partnerships to strengthen K-12 school education outcomes in eastern Bergen County.
At this free event, held in the school’s Hajjar Auditorium, citizens were able to meet with community leaders from all sectors, including public and government officials, school administrators, staff from nonprofit organizations, representatives from faith-based organizations and businesses, to help identify possible solutions to education’s challenges that can be met through partnership.
Guests were given program folders that guided them through the day’s activities and also included a list of Eastern Bergen County organizations.
After breakfast, The Community Chest’s Executive Director, Dr. Shelly Wimpfheimer, gave a brief overview of the mission and growth of The Community Chest, which launched its first fundraising campaign in Englewood in 1933 and now serves numerous communities throughout Eastern Bergen County.
“An Introduction to School-Community Partnerships” was presented by Kirsten Richert, CEO, Richert Innovation Consulting. Richert gave an overview of the Summit agenda, shared community collaboration guidelines.
The “Inspiration Panel” was then introduced, a group of experts who showed a wide variety of local examples of successful School-Community partnerships. Each presenter shared a brief inspiring story about their school-community partnership, explaining which partners are involved and how it is making a difference in education in their local area. The presenters were:
• Linda DePinto, from Big Brothers Big Sisters Program in Bergenfield Public Schools;
• Mary Swateck, grant manager of the Tenafly Education Foundation;
• Suad Gacham, director of school based programs at the Jewish Family & Children’s Services of northern New Jersey;
• Mariam Gerges, director of The Zone’s Apprentice Program;
• John Arthur, director of the Englewood Public Library; and
• Becky Serico, director of the Performing Arts School at bergenPAC.
Following that overture, each of the presenters used a slide presentation to illustrate their community relationship models and fundraising initiatives, emphasizing the factors that have made them successful.
DePinto talked about the very successful Big Brothers Big Sister of Bergenfield that is supported by the Bergenfield Public School District and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern New Jersey.
Next, Swatech gave an overview of the Tenafly Education Foundation, which has raised $800,000 for Tenafly schools since its inception. Swatech listed all of the foundation’s fundraising projects, such as the annual Tenafly 5K Run and Dog Walk, the Thank-a-Teacher Program, the Harlem Wizards event and grants and private donations.
She mentioned a number of programs that the money was used for, including STEAM projects and innovative programs like hydroponics.
Gacham spoke about the partnership that Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey has with the Ft. Lee Public Schools and the Cliffside Park Public School that funds it Club Ed program.
Gerges enumerated the merits of the Bergen Family Center’s Apprentice Program, which receives funding from the Englewood Chamber of Commerce and the City of Englewood.
“In this summer program, Englewood high school students not only work with local businesses, they also learn valuable readiness skills in the weekly workshops. As a result, they develop self-confidence, business expertise and have a great asset to list on their resumes when applying for college. A number of our apprentices have even been offered regular (after school) jobs in the fall.”
Next, Arthur spoke about the Englewood Public Library’s Adult Literacy Pathways ELL (English Language Learning) program that receives funding from the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development and Bergen Technical Schools.
The last panelist, Serico, described two key programs at the Performing Arts School at bergenPAC—Voices in Harmony and Chasing the Dragon.
“Voices in Harmony gives special needs students a beautiful platform to express themselves and become stars for a day performing on the main stage of the bergenPAC. Chasing the Dragon educates students, families, educators, and law enforcement officials on the opioid epidemic,” she said.
In addition to the Resource List that was originally provided showing potential partners for collaborating on School-Community Partnerships in our area after the presentations, participants helped flesh out crowdsource resource maps posted in the main room by adding organizations and programs that could be used to support 10 different topics.
Breakout sessions followed, then closing discussions
innovative partnerships. | PHOTO BY HILLARY VIDERS
After the general session, breakout sessions focused on specific partnerships, using an ideation tool to come up with ideas, get to know each other and think more deeply about potential school-community partnerships.
In a closing discussion, participants shared insights with each other. They said that there had been lots of room for creativity and collaboration and found they were leaving the session thinking about future partnerships. One insight was that schools had the ability to ask for something specific from an agency.
Another participant shared that they realized that they could advocate for other agencies when their agency wasn’t able to accomplish a goal but another agency might and there was an opportunity to partner on it together. “It would be good to do a Resource Share and find out what you have, what you could share, and what you lack so that other agencies might be able to fill the gaps.”
Through collaborative dialogue, The Chest’s Community Summit on Education identified solutions by using the Participatory Planning method to gather participants’ wisdom, interests and knowledge. Participants were inspired by models of successful community partnerships in our local schools. They discovered potential partnership resources and met new contacts in our area and generated ideas and learned how to further develop promising partnerships.
Attendees received three things as a follow up: a contact list of other attendees so they can stay in touch with each other, a list of the ideas that were generated in the breakout sessions and copies of the resource maps that were crowdsourced.
This successful Community Chest Summit on Education was a centripetal force for creating partnerships and collaborations between schools and communities in eastern Bergen County. The Chest now plans to use the collective thinking and new ideas generated from the Summit to inform its funding, training, collaboration efforts, and professional development provided to local nonprofit agencies serving eastern Bergen County.
Dr. Wimpfheimer closed the Summit by thanking participants and sharing “The Next Steps.” She said, “The Community Chest will review your thinking about ways we might work together in the future. We are also planning to include school-community partnerships as one focus of our grant making next year.”