All of our Foundation initiatives support powerful community engagement efforts that encourage community members to influence official decisions, and share ownership of their public schools.

The Ohio High School Transformation Initiative (OHSTI) is grounded in the belief that learning is about relationships - about making connections among people, places, resources, and ideas. OHSTI fosters real learning connections and relationships within Ohio's most challenged urban high schools. Here's how we build community engagement:

• During the design phase of OHSTI, teachers, students, parents, community members, and business leaders studied models of successful small schools nationwide, discussing the design with some of the nation's top researchers and educators. The schools with the strongest small school design plans received the funding to make their new schools a reality.
  
• Each district then identified a nonprofit organization to serve as a community partner. This "Center of Strength" now assumes responsibility for engaging the community in the small school redesign process on the school's behalf, providing meeting space, positive media coverage, or simply building trust and advocating for the new small school within the community.

Successful Early College high schools that engender long-term community support - both financial and volunteer - involve their communities in key decisions. Here's how:

• Early College high schools are developed by a planning team which includes a parent representative, community member, college/university representative, district representative, principal, and educators and union representatives from both the high school and higher education partner.
  
• Key decisions about the school are made in collaboration with the community, because the initiative supports "authentic community engagement," meaning substantive conversation that engage a broad array of stakeholders, including parents, business leaders, and community members.

Our Foundation is funding community engagement initiatives in Cincinnati and Dayton to help these school districts design not just effective, but remarkable, schools that will contribute to the success of their communities.

In collaboration with our partners, we create tools, research, and publications to facilitate community conversation and assist in planning innovative schools in Ohio and across the country.

Making the Difference: Research and Practice in Community Schools, a report on 20 initiatives across the nation that are centers of community, released by the Coalition for Community Schools, revealed that community-based schools generate greater academic achievement, family engagement, community vitality, and general effectiveness than traditional public schools. Our Schools as Centers of Community initiative facilitates "authentic" community engagement. In other words, we support community ownership, and participation in official decisions, rather than the approval of decisions that have already been made.