I’m participating and investing in a dialogue between community organizations and our local school systems.

One of the starting points taken by the planning group for the round-table discussion is framing the purpose as an opportunity to “explore different conversations about our school – community relations”.

I am very pleased to see this initiative move forward as I believe the round-table discussion has great potential to engage community in a new way.

That said, I think that while it’s useful to talk about school – community relations, I am supporting the notion that our discussion includes a critical point, namely that our community is what is in trouble and at risk.

My view and starting point is that both the school and social service system live within the community. By framing the community as our primary discussion topic (or domain) I believe our process will be much more targeted on tapping in on our community’s strengths. We will also have an opportunity to support an engagement structure that has the potential of widening our circle of members.

In our round-table discussions, these 2 sectors can learn how to communicate and collaborate more effectively together, however I believe our time together would be more productive if we focused our discussions on how we as community members (not system or service representatives) can restore community.

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Brent Learning Community community dialogue roundtable