How Parent-School-Community Relationships Facilitate Resource Access and Mobilization for Students Experiencing Homelessness

• In Event: 60.019 - How School Leaders and Communities Support Highly Mobile and Homeless Students and Families

Abstract

This study examined how school employees’ ties within the school district and to community organizations facilitated their work connecting families experiencing homelessness with needed information, services, and material goods. Analyzing data from interviews with school personnel, community agency employees, and parents experiencing homelessness, this study found that school-community collaboration helped school employees increase their awareness of the resources available within the school district and community. This study also found that school employees used their intraorganizational and interorganizational connections to help homeless families learn about, gain access to, and utilize resources that they had not previously possessed or to which they had lacked access. Homeless students and families achieved resource gains by investing in social relationships with these school employees.

Author

• Lea Samartino, University of Wisconsin - Madison