Consulting and Co-Designing a Male Empowerment Network Program

One of the greatest experiences I had in graduate school was in Dr. Karen L. Mapp's course, A122: The Why, What, and How of School, Family, and Community Partnerships. Dr. Mapp included a fieldwork assignment in her class and organize a series of organizations and school districts across the United States that offered to work with her students to work on real challenges facing their communities.  

The organization that spoke to me and my colleagues was the effort down in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. CMS has had a history with family engagement work in their school district, however requested some guidance and assistance with the development of their Male Empowerment Program, which would help bring positive male mentors into the 13 elementary schools throughout the district. Utilizing the partnerships that the district had already cultivated in their community, our team came in to support the standardization of family engagement practices across the district through the creation of a family engagement training manual, that all members of the CMS community would have access to.   

With our partners in CMS, we drafted, iterated, and collaborated on a training manual that included key components of the Dual Capacity Building Framework designed by Dr. Mapp, research around mentorship and toxic masculinity, and provided a framework that would help guide the process in building their family engagement practices.