Best practices in a community participation in education – impact and sustainability

The Community School Alliances (CSA) project works through three broad strategic objectives, which are broken down into a series of more concrete sub-objectives. Sub-objectives are based on a series of ‘best practices’ for involving communities in education programs. The CSA project strives to meet the ‘best practice’ sub-objectives through a number of interrelated interventions. All interventions are designed to involve and respond to community members. CSA connects each of its intervention strategies to its 15 ‘best practices’ sub-objectives. This linkage is an important tool for monitoring the impact of each intervention. At various times throughout the intervention cycle, stakeholders rate communities’ progress toward achieving ‘best practice’ sub-objectives. This process identifies interventions that need reinforcement to help communities achieve sustainability.