Building School–Family–Community Partnerships as Acts of Justice, Resilience, and Courage: A Justice-Centered, Resilience-Focused Framework for Urban Schools

• In Event: Part 2: Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of Urban Education: Past, Present, and Future Directions

Abstract

In the face of growing racialized harm, anti-immigrant policies, and attacks on equity in education, school–family–community partnerships in urban schools must be reimagined as acts of justice, resilience, and courage. This article offers a framework grounded in the Bryan and Henry (2012) seven-step model, reinterpreted through justice-centered and resilience-focused social capital. We center Black and Latino immigrant families and highlight how counselors and educators can enact liberatory and subversive partnership strategies that protect, empower, and transform. Drawing on foundational scholarship and lived realities, we explore how school counselors and teachers can build equity-driven partnerships by working with cultural brokers, promotoras/es, and trusted messengers. By weaving together relational trust, shared leadership, and political clarity, these partnerships become protective infrastructures in hostile educational climates—and powerful vehicles for healing, advocacy, and liberation.

Author

• Julia Bryan, Pennsylvania State University