“If We Come Together Then We Have Power:” Illinois Families Leading Across Communities

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3) Friendship, Parenting and Community Organizing

Abstract

The Parent Power and Leadership Study (2020-2025) is a national study documenting how the leadership and organizing of parents across the country through progressive community-based organizations are shaping the learning and growth of children in five states.

In Illinois, for nearly 30 years, Latino and Black parents have organized through the COFI Way model of family-focused leadership development and organizing (Community Organizing and Family Issues). Parents come together across Chicago and the state through the parent-led group POWER-PAC-IL, to tackle issues from school discipline reform and mental health awareness to economic justice and early learning improvements. Multi-disciplinary research finds that when a family member participates civically, including actively talking about current social issues, this has reverberating effects on other family members, including fostering a commitment to create social change among family youth (Diemer 2012; Pinetta et al 2020). In this paper, we build on this work, as well as other research that documents how the civic engagement of parents has importantly generated necessary changes to culture and policies within schools, safety net programs, the criminal legal system and more (Warren 2021; Hong, 2011; Pardo 1998), by delving into the processes that help to explain these relationships and highlight the role of community organizing institutions like COFI that make this link possible. Through 24 interviews and focus groups, we find that leadership development and organizing through the COFI Way model in Illinois shapes family learning and growth through the core processes of modeling. As a result of the civic modeling of their parents, youth described believing in the possibility of positive change, they sometimes confidently disagreed on issue areas, they too became bridges of information and resources for their friends and neighbors, and they identified themselves as valuable community contributors. Readers will walk away with a better understanding of how youth makes sense of and respond to their parents’ civic engagement in nuanced ways, as well as the role that community-based organizations can play in fostering this somewhat unintended learning and growth.

Author

• Jennifer Elena Cossyleon, University of California-Merced