the school as a community essay

How to Write the Community Essay – Guide with Examples (2023-24)

September 6, 2023

Students applying to college this year will inevitably confront the community essay. In fact, most students will end up responding to several community essay prompts for different schools. For this reason, you should know more than simply how to approach the community essay as a genre. Rather, you will want to learn how to decipher the nuances of each particular prompt, in order to adapt your response appropriately. In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that, through several community essay examples. These examples will also demonstrate how to avoid cliché and make the community essay authentically and convincingly your own.

Emphasis on Community

Do keep in mind that inherent in the word “community” is the idea of multiple people. The personal statement already provides you with a chance to tell the college admissions committee about yourself as an individual. The community essay, however, suggests that you depict yourself among others. You can use this opportunity to your advantage by showing off interpersonal skills, for example. Or, perhaps you wish to relate a moment that forged important relationships. This in turn will indicate what kind of connections you’ll make in the classroom with college peers and professors.

Apart from comprising numerous people, a community can appear in many shapes and sizes. It could be as small as a volleyball team, or as large as a diaspora. It could fill a town soup kitchen, or spread across five boroughs. In fact, due to the internet, certain communities today don’t even require a physical place to congregate. Communities can form around a shared identity, shared place, shared hobby, shared ideology, or shared call to action. They can even arise due to a shared yet unforeseen circumstance.

What is the Community Essay All About?             

In a nutshell, the community essay should exhibit three things:

• An aspect of yourself, 2. in the context of a community you belonged to, and 3. how this experience may shape your contribution to the community you’ll join in college.

It may look like a fairly simple equation: 1 + 2 = 3. However, each college will word their community essay prompt differently, so it’s important to look out for additional variables. One college may use the community essay as a way to glimpse your core values. Another may use the essay to understand how you would add to diversity on campus. Some may let you decide in which direction to take it—and there are many ways to go!

To get a better idea of how the prompts differ, let’s take a look at some real community essay prompts from the current admission cycle.

Sample 2023-2024 Community Essay Prompts

1) brown university.

“Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (200-250 words)”

A close reading of this prompt shows that Brown puts particular emphasis on place. They do this by using the words “home,” “College Hill,” and “where they came from.” Thus, Brown invites writers to think about community through the prism of place. They also emphasize the idea of personal growth or change, through the words “inspired or challenged you.” Therefore, Brown wishes to see how the place you grew up in has affected you. And, they want to know how you in turn will affect their college community.

“NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world-class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience.

We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community. Please respond in 250 words or less.”

Here, NYU places an emphasis on students’ “identity,” “backgrounds,” and “diversity,” rather than any physical place. (For some students, place may be tied up in those ideas.) Furthermore, while NYU doesn’t ask specifically how identity has changed the essay writer, they do ask about your “experience.” Take this to mean that you can still recount a specific moment, or several moments, that work to portray your particular background. You should also try to link your story with NYU’s values of inclusivity and opportunity.

3) University of Washington

“Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW. (300 words max) Tip: Keep in mind that the UW strives to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints.”

UW ’s community essay prompt may look the most approachable, for they help define the idea of community. You’ll notice that most of their examples (“families,” “cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood”…) place an emphasis on people. This may clue you in on their desire to see the relationships you’ve made. At the same time, UW uses the words “individual” and “richly diverse.” They, like NYU, wish to see how you fit in and stand out, in order to boost campus diversity.

Writing Your First Community Essay

Begin by picking which community essay you’ll write first. (For practical reasons, you’ll probably want to go with whichever one is due earliest.) Spend time doing a close reading of the prompt, as we’ve done above. Underline key words. Try to interpret exactly what the prompt is asking through these keywords.

Next, brainstorm. I recommend doing this on a blank piece of paper with a pencil. Across the top, make a row of headings. These might be the communities you’re a part of, or the components that make up your identity. Then, jot down descriptive words underneath in each column—whatever comes to you. These words may invoke people and experiences you had with them, feelings, moments of growth, lessons learned, values developed, etc. Now, narrow in on the idea that offers the richest material and that corresponds fully with the prompt.

Lastly, write! You’ll definitely want to describe real moments, in vivid detail. This will keep your essay original, and help you avoid cliché. However, you’ll need to summarize the experience and answer the prompt succinctly, so don’t stray too far into storytelling mode.

How To Adapt Your Community Essay

Once your first essay is complete, you’ll need to adapt it to the other colleges involving community essays on your list. Again, you’ll want to turn to the prompt for a close reading, and recognize what makes this prompt different from the last. For example, let’s say you’ve written your essay for UW about belonging to your swim team, and how the sports dynamics shaped you. Adapting that essay to Brown’s prompt could involve more of a focus on place. You may ask yourself, how was my swim team in Alaska different than the swim teams we competed against in other states?

Once you’ve adapted the content, you’ll also want to adapt the wording to mimic the prompt. For example, let’s say your UW essay states, “Thinking back to my years in the pool…” As you adapt this essay to Brown’s prompt, you may notice that Brown uses the word “reflection.” Therefore, you might change this sentence to “Reflecting back on my years in the pool…” While this change is minute, it cleverly signals to the reader that you’ve paid attention to the prompt, and are giving that school your full attention.

What to Avoid When Writing the Community Essay  

• Avoid cliché. Some students worry that their idea is cliché, or worse, that their background or identity is cliché. However, what makes an essay cliché is not the content, but the way the content is conveyed. This is where your voice and your descriptions become essential.
• Avoid giving too many examples. Stick to one community, and one or two anecdotes arising from that community that allow you to answer the prompt fully.
• Don’t exaggerate or twist facts. Sometimes students feel they must make themselves sound more “diverse” than they feel they are. Luckily, diversity is not a feeling. Likewise, diversity does not simply refer to one’s heritage. If the prompt is asking about your identity or background, you can show the originality of your experiences through your actions and your thinking.

Community Essay Examples and Analysis

Brown university community essay example.

I used to hate the NYC subway. I’ve taken it since I was six, going up and down Manhattan, to and from school. By high school, it was a daily nightmare. Spending so much time underground, underneath fluorescent lighting, squashed inside a rickety, rocking train car among strangers, some of whom wanted to talk about conspiracy theories, others who had bedbugs or B.O., or who manspread across two seats, or bickered—it wore me out. The challenge of going anywhere seemed absurd. I dreaded the claustrophobia and disgruntlement.

Yet the subway also inspired my understanding of community. I will never forget the morning I saw a man, several seats away, slide out of his seat and hit the floor. The thump shocked everyone to attention. What we noticed: he appeared drunk, possibly homeless. I was digesting this when a second man got up and, through a sort of awkward embrace, heaved the first man back into his seat. The rest of us had stuck to subway social codes: don’t step out of line. Yet this second man’s silent actions spoke loudly. They said, “I care.”

That day I realized I belong to a group of strangers. What holds us together is our transience, our vulnerabilities, and a willingness to assist. This community is not perfect but one in motion, a perpetual work-in-progress. Now I make it my aim to hold others up. I plan to contribute to the Brown community by helping fellow students and strangers in moments of precariousness.    

Brown University Community Essay Example Analysis

Here the student finds an original way to write about where they come from. The subway is not their home, yet it remains integral to ideas of belonging. The student shows how a community can be built between strangers, in their responsibility toward each other. The student succeeds at incorporating key words from the prompt (“challenge,” “inspired” “Brown community,” “contribute”) into their community essay.

UW Community Essay Example

I grew up in Hawaii, a world bound by water and rich in diversity. In school we learned that this sacred land was invaded, first by Captain Cook, then by missionaries, whalers, traders, plantation owners, and the U.S. government. My parents became part of this problematic takeover when they moved here in the 90s. The first community we knew was our church congregation. At the beginning of mass, we shook hands with our neighbors. We held hands again when we sang the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t realize our church wasn’t “normal” until our diocese was informed that we had to stop dancing hula and singing Hawaiian hymns. The order came from the Pope himself.

Eventually, I lost faith in God and organized institutions. I thought the banning of hula—an ancient and pure form of expression—seemed medieval, ignorant, and unfair, given that the Hawaiian religion had already been stamped out. I felt a lack of community and a distrust for any place in which I might find one. As a postcolonial inhabitant, I could never belong to the Hawaiian culture, no matter how much I valued it. Then, I was shocked to learn that Queen Ka’ahumanu herself had eliminated the Kapu system, a strict code of conduct in which women were inferior to men. Next went the Hawaiian religion. Queen Ka’ahumanu burned all the temples before turning to Christianity, hoping this religion would offer better opportunities for her people.

Community Essay (Continued)

I’m not sure what to make of this history. Should I view Queen Ka’ahumanu as a feminist hero, or another failure in her islands’ tragedy? Nothing is black and white about her story, but she did what she thought was beneficial to her people, regardless of tradition. From her story, I’ve learned to accept complexity. I can disagree with institutionalized religion while still believing in my neighbors. I am a product of this place and their presence. At UW, I plan to add to campus diversity through my experience, knowing that diversity comes with contradictions and complications, all of which should be approached with an open and informed mind.

UW Community Essay Example Analysis

This student also manages to weave in words from the prompt (“family,” “community,” “world,” “product of it,” “add to the diversity,” etc.). Moreover, the student picks one of the examples of community mentioned in the prompt, (namely, a religious group,) and deepens their answer by addressing the complexity inherent in the community they’ve been involved in. While the student displays an inner turmoil about their identity and participation, they find a way to show how they’d contribute to an open-minded campus through their values and intellectual rigor.

What’s Next

For more on supplemental essays and essay writing guides, check out the following articles:

• How to Write the Why This Major Essay + Example
• How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example
• How to Start a College Essay – 12 Techniques and Tips
• College Essay

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.

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School-Community Collaboration: An Approach to Integrating and Democratizing Knowledge

Taylor Hausburg, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education – EdD Student in Teaching, Learning & Teacher Education

In this article, I weave practice and theory into a framework for distinguishing between school-community engagement and school-community collaboration , by considering if and how each approach integrates school- and community-based knowledge. I argue that, while school-community engagement efforts build students’ knowledge of  or  for their communities, school-community collaboration happens when students co-construct knowledge with their communities. Drawing from my own experience as an educator and the academic literature describing school-community partnerships, I offer a brief sketch of each of these three approaches to knowledge-building, in order to spark conversation around the question: How might schools and teachers create more opportunities that transcend school-community engagement and represent true collaboration?

Key Words:   school-community collaboration, school-community engagement, school-community partnerships

If viewing students as empty vessels is an act of oppression (Freire, 1968/2015), then failing to see, and failing to help students see, the rich educational resources embedded in their homes and communities is an equally egregious act of epistemological violence. Indeed, even the best-intentioned schools and teachers may overlook the full range of implications of prioritizing school-based, academic knowledge over community-based knowledge: While doing so may help students from marginalized communities access the cultural capital that they will need to “succeed” in society (Bourdieu, 1986), it may also teach them to take a deficit orientation towards their communities by devaluing the funds of knowledge stored in their own lived experiences, and those of their families, neighbors, and ancestors (Moll, 2000). It is therefore imperative that schools and teachers committed to social justice cultivate in students the values, mindsets, and skills required for authentic school-community collaboration. 

I use the term school-community collaboration to refer to experiences in which (1) school- and community-based knowledge is equally valued and actively integrated, and (2) power is evenly distributed among school and community members (Schutz, 2006). In this essay, I reflect on the first criterion — namely, the knowledge-building process—as a way of shedding light on the second—the distribution of power.  Indeed, participation in formal social institutions and processes, like schools and knowledge generation, is the very foundation of power (Arnstein, 1969). School-community collaboration overlaps with but is distinct from school-community engagement, which, though more popular in academic literature, tends to denote a less critical and equitable approach to knowledge-building and power-sharing. While school-based community engagement strategies might aim to build students’ knowledge of or for their communities, school-community collaboration strategies push students to co-construct knowledge with their communities. This distinction matters because, as Schutz (2006) explains, 

improved school-community engagement [or, school-community collaboration] has the potential to contribute not only to academic achievement, but also to an alteration, over time, of schools’ [and students’] core understandings of their role in promoting a more equal and more democratic society. (p. 693)

My interest in school-community collaboration stems from my previous work with a school that I will refer to as Neta Academy [1] . Neta Academy is an all-girls secondary school situated in the outskirts of a large city in West India. According to its mission statement, the school aims to support the educational and economic development of India by cultivating a cadre of empowered female leaders to drive development in the country’s most under-resourced areas. To this end, Neta Academy was designed to serve 500 6 th –12 th grade students, who are recruited by the school and its partner non-governmental organizations from municipal schools across the city. Candidates participate in an application process that evaluates not only their English language and arithmetic skills, but also their vision for themselves, their families, and their communities. Selected students participate in a rigorous curriculum that includes a signature leadership development program. 

From 2015–2017, I served as the founding Instructional Lead of Neta Academy’s leadership program. In this role, I was responsible for effectively translating the school’s mission statement into a curriculum for the school’s Leadership [2] course, which students in every grade level were required to attend twice each week. With this goal in mind, I decided to center the course around a yearly Community Engagement Project (CEP), which aimed to develop students’ leadership mindset and skills. I was hoping that, through this project, students would come to understand that leadership is essentially about creating positive change, and that changemaking is a complex and collective endeavor.

To this end, the CEP began with an exploration of the challenges facing students’ communities alongside students’ individual interests as they intersected with those challenges. After each student had identified a socially and personally important issue (e.g., gender discrimination or water wastage), her first task was to write and conduct surveys and interviews to gather more information about the focal issue from community members. Students then used the data generated by the surveys and interviews to construct root cause maps, in an effort to identify specific underlying problems that they could more directly target. From there, students crafted a vision for and set goals around what they wanted to accomplish, before designing and implementing small-scale, strategic interventions. In class, students participated in a series of workshops in which they were introduced to a variety of changemaking strategies (e.g., looking for positive outliers, articulating a compelling vision), and then asked to apply those strategies to their own projects. Additional class time was used to participate in peer feedback circles, in which students collectively discussed and brainstormed solutions to common obstacles, reflected on what they were learning from the process, and created and maintained portfolios documenting their work. 

At the end of the first year, students presented their projects and learnings in a schoolwide showcase. Listening to these presentations, I was impressed by what my students had accomplished over the course of eight months: They had led community classes, written and directed street plays, circulated petitions, arranged meetings with local leaders and, in two unique cases, planted a community garden and dug a community compost pit. Yet, while it was clear to me that they had come to see leadership as changemaking, I was not convinced that the structure of the CEP had pushed students to engage with the collective nature of this process. Indeed, I realized that many students had come to view their interactions with their neighbors in transactional terms, as either a means to obtain important information (e.g., conducting interviews to collect data) or an attempt to gain “followers” (e.g., recruiting participants for a community class). Both cases reinforced the view of students as the sole purveyors of knowledge. In the first case, students extracted information from community members without engaging them in making sense of that information. In the second, students regarded community members as empty vessels to be filled with information about social issues and possible solutions. I saw how this one-sided approach to knowledge-building created a power asymmetry between students and community members, and thereby undermined authentic collaboration. I was left wondering if and how I could support students to take more of a resource orientation towards their communities, and community members to assume the mantle of civic participation—a crucial ingredient in large-scale, sustainable social reform. More actively engaging community members in the CEP seemed to be a promising path to this goal.

Thus, in the second year and iteration of the course, I built a new element into the Leadership curriculum—namely, the Community Action Group (CAG). At the beginning of the CEP, each student was responsible for assembling a CAG of at least three community members representing a range of social locations and perspectives, who she then collaborated with over the course of the project. Students were required to meet with their CAGs at least once a month, in order to teach group members about the changemaking strategies that they had studied in class, to create space for community members to share their tacit knowledge of local issues, and to facilitate a discussion about how to meld formal leadership theory with local wisdom and thus design a more effective social intervention. In this way, I aimed to build a more collaborative learning experience that positioned community members as co-constructors, rather than passive benefactors, of students’ leadership education in particular, and local development efforts more broadly (Arnstein, 1969). Indeed, at the end of the second year, many students’ presentations featured photos of Neta and non-Neta students, younger siblings, parents, and even grandparents sitting in circles, brainstorming ideas, exchanging perspectives, and planning their interventions. This experience showed me that embedding community collaboration into school-based curriculum can be a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. 

The potential academic, ethical, and social benefits of embedding school-community collaboration into academic curriculum are significant. For one, such collaboration stands to improve student learning outcomes. According to sociocultural learning theory, learning is a deeply contextualized process; therefore, the work of teaching must involve identifying funds of knowledge in students’ families and communities to leverage in the classroom (Moll, 2000; Vygotsky, 1978). Integrating these funds of knowledge into curriculum is one way in which teachers can create more contextually relevant and authentic school-based learning experiences, leading to greater student investment (Cranton, 2012) and, in turn, greater learning outcomes (Knowles, 1975). Yet excavating such cultural wealth is not merely a teacher’s professional responsibility; it is their ethical duty. Freire (1998) argues that integrating school- and community-based knowledge is especially crucial for teachers working with marginalized populations, asking: “Why not establish an ‘intimate’ connection between knowledge considered basic to any school curriculum and knowledge that is the fruit of the lived experience of [...] students as individuals?” (p. 36) By bringing academic knowledge into conversation with the wisdom of lived experience, school-community collaboration challenges traditional ideas about what/whose knowledge is important, democratizes the knowledge-building process, and thus operates as a mechanism for social transformation.

Despite the many potential benefits of integrating school- and community-based knowledge, the majority of school-community engagement efforts that I have encountered in academic literature serve to build students’ knowledge of or for their communities, rather than to create opportunities for students to co-construct knowledge with their communities. Because the active integration of school- and community-based knowledge is a key element of school-community collaboration (Schutz, 2006), such efforts, though important and valuable in other ways, do not represent true collaboration. Drawing from my own experience as a teacher and teacher educator, and from the academic literature describing school-community engagement/collaboration initiatives, I provide a brief description and example of each approach below:

• Knowledge of community: Community members are seen as a valuable source of information that students can and should learn from. Having students conduct interviews with community members or inviting locally-based guest speakers to school to discuss a given topic are two strategies that align with this approach. The survey distribution and analysis phase of the first iteration of the Community Engagement Project (or CEP, as described above) aimed to build students’ knowledge of their communities.
• Knowledge for community: Community members are positioned as passive benefactors of students’ learning. Service-learning and youth participatory action research (YPAR) initiatives that support students in tackling local issues on behalf of their communities (e.g., Mirra et al., 2015) exemplify this approach. Teaching students changemaking strategies and having them work independently as they figure out how to apply those strategies—as I did in the first version of the CEP—is a specific example of building students’ knowledge for their communities.
• Knowledge with community: Community members serve as co-generators of knowledge. While Felten and Clayton (2011) assert that service-learning has the potential to support such reciprocal learning, there is a lack of illustrative examples of this approach in the literature. Having students assemble and work with Community Action Groups (or CAGs) may be one way of pushing students to create knowledge with their communities.

I would classify the first two approaches, which represent a lesser degree of knowledge integration, as school-community engagement, and the third approach, which demands a higher degree of integration, as school-community collaboration. Two characteristics distinguish these three approaches: (1) the directionality of knowledge flow (or who is giving and receiving information), and (2) the purpose of the knowledge-building process. Figure 1 captures the differences among these three approaches along these two salient dimensions. The directionality and purpose of knowledge-building both have important implications for power distribution. Indeed, if “knowledge is power,” then examining who is seen as the source of information (directionality) and who benefits from knowledge-building efforts (purpose) is essential for understanding how power is distributed between students and community members. In my view, it is only when knowledge exchange is bidirectional and learning is bilateral that power is evenly shared and school-community partnerships are truly democratic.

Figure 1: Directionality and purpose of knowledge exchange

In the end, school-community engagement and school-community collaboration are not one and the same. It is important to consider what different partnership efforts and structures explicitly or implicitly communicate about the relationship between school- and community-based knowledge. When we ask ourselves if and how school-community partnerships work to build students’ knowledge of, for, or with their communities, I predict that we will begin to see many more instances of school-community engagement. While having students collaborate with community members to co-construct small-scale social interventions represents one humble attempt at facilitating authentic collaboration, I am left wondering: How else might schools and teachers create opportunities that transcend school-community engagement and represent true school-community collaboration? 

[1]  I have used a pseudonym to protect the school’s identity.

[2]  I have modified the name of this course to protect the school’s identity.

Taylor Hausburg is an EdD student in Teaching, Learning & Teacher Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Before studying at Penn GSE, Taylor worked as a founding faculty member of an all-girls secondary school in India, where she developed the school’s leadership program. She also taught college-level English in Rwanda through the Fulbright Program, and middle-school math in California through Teach for America. Taylor’s research and professional interests include social-emotional learning, curriculum design, and teacher education. She holds a BA in Linguistics from Duke University and an MA in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount University.

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Planning Association, 35 (4), 216–224.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood.

Cranton, P. (2012). Planning instruction for adult learners (3rded.) . Wall & Emerson.

Felten, P., & Clayton, P. H. (2011). Service-Learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 128 , 75–84.

Freire, P. (1968/2015). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Bloomsbury.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield.

Knowles, M. S. (1975). Self-directed learning: A guide for learners and teachers. Follett Publishing Company.

Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2015). Doing youth participatory action research: Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators and students. Routledge. 

Moll, L. C. (2000). Inspired by Vygotsky: Ethnographic Experiments in Education. In C. D. Lee and P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning Through Collaborative Inquiry (pp. 256-268).

Schutz, A. (2006). Home is a prison in the global city: The tragic failure of school-based community engagement strategies. Review of Educational Research, 76 (4), 691–743.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Articles in this Volume

[tid]: school-community collaboration: an approach to integrating and democratizing knowledge, [tid]: equity gaps for students with disabilities, [tid]: what are leaders of tech programs for black students willing to sacrifice for money, [tid]: the things we carry, [tid]: what’s going right language play and bilingual identities in a predominantly african american dual-language classroom, [tid]: on the power of the collective in community-based educational research, [tid]: the empire strikes back: state takeover and education in michigan, [tid]: flux pedagogy: transforming teaching and leading during coronavirus.

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School-Community Partnerships: Purpose and Outcomes Essay

Introduction, the partnership’s purpose and mission, analysis of the outcomes and the impact of the partnership, the understanding of critical connections between schools and communities.

Schools that seek improvement of the educational process often establish collaboration with external organizations or individuals whose impact might be beneficial. Such partnerships are particularly useful when an educational organization needs some contribution from an outer party within a specific field of expertise for a systematic change (Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA, n.d.). The work with a community enables the school to cooperate with “parents, youth, community residents, and/or institutions to alter existing power relationships and policies and create more accountable, equitable, and high-quality schools for all students” (Renee & McAlister, 2011, p. 3). Thus, the implementation of the change plan aimed at increasing teachers’ readiness to provide first aid to students at GEMS World Academy needs to establish a partnership with a community organization specializing in medical care.

Community engagement has a significant impact on a school’s performance and ultimately affects students’ success. To validate the necessity of collaboration with a community organization, it is vital to understand the needs that a school faces. GEMS World Academy’s performance analysis showed that the majority of faculty staff lack competence in providing first aid to students. The safety and wellbeing of the pupils are one of the primary values of the educational institution. Moreover, a school administrator is a leader whose primary responsibility is to promote success for all pupils by collaborating with neighborhoods (Owens & Valesky, 2007). Thus, the school has an urgent need for reforming the current situation to ensure teachers’ readiness to prioritize students’ health issues. Overall, the partnership should be strategic and adhere to collaborative leadership (Anderson-Butcher, Lawson, Bean, Boone, & Kwiatkowski, 2004). Such an approach will ensure benefits for both, the educational organization and its partner.

School change is a complicated procedure that needs to be carried out on multiple levels. It incorporates “not only the practical business of curriculum and teaching, but also many layers of power, politics, beliefs, and culture” (Renee & McAlister, 2011, p. 7). Consequently, it is essential to engage in inter-organizational relationships to facilitate the effectiveness of the school reform. The purpose of the partnership between the school and the community-based healthcare organization is to implement a training program for the teachers working at GEMS. It will allow for reducing the number of cases when a child is exposed to pain while waiting for a medical professional to provide primary help. The training sessions should be focused on the learning of theoretical background and practicing skills of first aid techniques. The mission of the collaboration is to enhance students’ safety at school and improve the level of expertise in faculty that will result in the overall advancement of the school performance.

In case of successful establishment of productive partnership relations with a healthcare institution and its professionals, the outcomes will provide multiple benefits for the school and the medical organization. According to VanderWielen et al. (2014), the research of interprofessional collaboration initiated by medical students suggested that the cooperation based on multiple professions provided more natural transformations in required areas. Similarly, the anticipated outcomes of the analyzed partnership model will be positive for both parties. Firstly, the school will be provided with highly-professional training services aimed at teaching skills of first aid. Secondly, the healthcare organization might benefit from students’ and teachers’ volunteer work at its facilities. This connection will positively impact the school due to the improvement of the faculty’s performance. The teachers will acquire new skills necessary for their everyday work in school and, from a long-term perspective, will be able to teach children to provide first aid themselves. However, it is essential to take into account possible challenges that the administration of the school might face when seeking connections with a community organization.

The literature review and the description of the partnerships between a school and a healthcare facility enlarged the scope of my understanding of the importance of the connections between the educational organization and community. According to the Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA (n.d.), “schools are more effective and caring places when they are an integral and positive part of the community” (p. 6). Research shows that throughout history, school and neighborhoods interactions have led to significant shifts not only in the work of the organizations but also in the life of society (Renee & McAlister, 2011). Also, as Renee and McAlister (2011) claim, the very participation of members of a community in the decision-making process can positively contribute to the public perception of any reform. Thus, when a change plan is implemented in school, it is vital to coordinate the actions of the administration with parents and involved community services to intensify the scope of reform and ensure its efficacy. Besides, the partnership presents beneficial opportunities not only for schools but also for organizations they collaborate with. Thus, such cooperation allows for focusing on urgent issues and improves the community’s wellbeing in general.

To sum up, effective contemporary school reforming is impossible without the multifaceted connections with outside parties, stakeholders, and communities. When isolated, a school might omit some crucial factors that provide perspectives for a complex change in school performance. In the case of GEMS World Academy change implementation, the partnership with a healthcare facility will present benefits for improving teachers’ readiness to provide first aid to students. Besides, this type of collaboration will enhance the connection of the school with the community.

• Anderson-Butcher, D., Lawson, H., Bean, J., Boone, B., & Kwiatkowski, A. (2004). Implementation guide: The Ohio community collaboration model for school improvement . Columbus, OH: The Ohio Department of Education.
• Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA. (n.d.). School-Community Partnerships: A Guide. Los Angeles, CA: Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA.
• Owens, R. G., & Valesky, T. C. (2007). Organizational behavior in education: Adaptive leadership and school reform (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
• Renee, M., & McAlister, S. (2011). The strengths and challenges of community organizing as an education reform strategy: What the research says. Nellie Mae Education Foundation.
• VanderWielen, L. M., Do, E. K., Diallo, H. I., LaCoe, K. N., Nguyen, N. L., Parikh, S. A., … Dow, A. W. (2014). Interprofessional collaboration led by health professional students: A case study of the inter Health Professionals Alliance at Virginia Commonwealth University. Journal of Research in Interprofessional Practice and Education, 3 (3), 1-13.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 21). School-Community Partnerships: Purpose and Outcomes. https://ivypanda.com/essays/school-community-partnerships-purpose-and-outcomes/

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "School-Community Partnerships: Purpose and Outcomes." March 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/school-community-partnerships-purpose-and-outcomes/.

• School-Community Partnerships Building
• Collaborating With Families and Community Members
• School Community Entrepreneurial Partnership
• Undiscovered Killers: The Ineffectiveness of Zero-Tolerance Policies
• GEMS World Academy: School Improvement Plan
• Geology: Treasures of the Earth Gems Documentary
• Libraries are Hidden Gems: Do Not Let Them Become a Thing of the Past
• Exporting Diamonds of Africa
• Academy of Management
• The Freshman Academy Concept Analysis
• Free Speech and Mutual Respect on Campus
• The Use of Technology in the Classroom
• Criterion and Content and Construct-Related Evidence of Validity
• Education Historical Perspectives
• Understanding the Facets of Motivation

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Blog > Essay Advice , Supplementals > How to Write a Community Supplemental Essay (with Examples)

How to Write a Community Supplemental Essay (with Examples)

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Kylie Kistner, MA Former Willamette University Admissions

Key Takeaway

If you're applying to college, there's a good chance you'll be writing a Community Essay for one (or lots) of your supplementals. In this post, we show you how to write one that stands out.

This post is one in a series of posts about the supplemental essays . You can read our core “how-to” supplemental post here .

When schools admit you, they aren’t just admitting you to be a student. They’re also admitting you to be a community member.

Community supplemental essays help universities understand how you would fit into their school community. At their core, Community prompts allow you to explicitly show an admissions officer why you would be the perfect addition to the school’s community.

Let’s get into what a Community supplemental essay is, what strategies you can use to stand out, and which steps you can take to write the best one possible.

What is a Community supplemental essay?

Community supplemental essay prompts come in a number of forms. Some ask you to talk about a community you already belong to, while others ask you to expand on how you would contribute to the school you’re applying to.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

1: Rice University

Rice is lauded for creating a collaborative atmosphere that enhances the quality of life for all members of our campus community. The Residential College System and undergraduate life is heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural tradition each student brings. What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community? 500 word limit.

2: Swarthmore College

Swarthmore students’ worldviews are often forged by their prior experiences and exposure to ideas and values. Our students are often mentored, supported, and developed by their immediate context—in their neighborhoods, communities of faith, families, and classrooms. Reflect on what elements of your home, school, or community have shaped you or positively impacted you. How have you grown or changed because of the influence of your community?

Community Essay Strategy

Your Community essay strategy will likely depend on the kind of Community essay you’re asked to write. As with all supplemental essays, the goal of any community essay should be to write about the strengths that make you a good fit for the school in question.

How to write about a community to which you belong

Most Community essay prompts give you a lot of flexibility in how you define “community.” That means that the community you write about probably isn’t limited to the more formal communities you’re part of like family or school. Your communities can also include friend groups, athletic teams, clubs and organizations, online communities, and more.

There are two things you should consider before you even begin writing your essay.

What school values is the prompt looking for?

Whether they’re listed implicitly or explicitly, Community essay prompts often include values that you can align your essay response with.

To explain, let’s look at this short supplemental prompt from the University of Notre Dame:

If you were given unlimited resources to help solve one problem in your community, what would it be and how would you accomplish it?

Now, this prompt doesn’t outright say anything about values. But the question itself, even being so short, implies a few values:

a) That you should be active in your community

b) That you should be aware of your community’s problems

c) That you know how to problem-solve

d) That you’re able to collaborate with your community

After dissecting the prompt for these values, you can write a Community essay that showcases how you align with them.

What else are admissions officers learning about you through the community you choose?

In addition to showing what a good community member you are, your Community supplemental essays can also let you talk about other parts of your experience. Doing so can help you find the perfect narrative balance among all your essays.

Let’s use a quick example.

If I’m a student applying to computer science programs, then I might choose to write about the community I’ve found in my robotics team. More specifically, I might write about my role as cheerleader and principle problem-solver of my robotics team. Writing about my robotics team allows me to do two things:

Show that I’m a really supportive person in my community, and

Show that I’m on a robotics team that means a lot to me.

Now, it’s important not to co-opt your Community essay and turn it into a secret Extracurricular essay , but it’s important to be thinking about all the information an admissions officer will learn about you based on the community you choose to focus on.

How to write about what you’ll contribute to your new community

The other segment of Community essays are those that ask you to reflect on how your specific experiences will contribute to your new community.

It’s important that you read each prompt carefully so you know what to focus your essay on.

These kinds of Community prompts let you explicitly drive home why you belong at the school you’re applying to.

Here are two suggestions to get you started.

Draw out the values.

This kind of Community prompt also typically contains some kind of reference to values. The Rice prompt is a perfect example of this:

Rice is lauded for creating a collaborative atmosphere that enhances the quality of life for all members of our campus community . The Residential College System and undergraduate life is heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural tradition each student brings. What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community? 500 word limit.

There are several values here:

a) Collaboration

b) Enhancing quality of life

c) For all members of the community

d) Residential system (AKA not just in the classroom)

e) Sharing unique life experiences and cultural traditions with other students

Note that the actual question of the prompt is “What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community?” If you skimmed the beginning of the prompt to get to the question, you’d miss all these juicy details about what a Rice student looks like.

But with them in mind, you can choose to write about a life perspective that you hold that aligns with these five values.

Find detailed connections to the school.

Since these kinds of Community prompts ask you what you would contribute to the school community, this is your chance to find the most logical and specific connections you can. Browse the school website and social media to find groups, clubs, activities, communities, or support systems that are related to your personal background and experiences. When appropriate based on the prompt, these kinds of connections can help you show how good a fit you are for the school and community.

How to do Community Essay school research

Looking at school values means doing research on the school’s motto, mission statement, and strategic plans. This information is all carefully curated by a university to reflect the core values, initiatives, and goals of an institution. They can guide your Community essay by giving you more values options to include.

We’ll use the Rice mission statement as an example. It says,

As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to pathbreaking research , unsurpassed teaching , and contribution to the betterment of our world . It seeks to fulfill this mission by cultivating a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor.

I’ve bolded just a few of the most important values we can draw out.

As we’ll see in the next section, I can use these values to brainstorm my Community essay.

How to write a Community Supplemental Essay

Step 1: Read the prompt closely & identify any relevant values.

When writing any supplemental essay, your first step should always be to closely read the prompt. You can even annotate it. It’s important to do this so you know exactly what is being asked of you.

With Community essays specifically, you can also highlight any values you think the prompt is asking you to elaborate on.

Keeping track of the prompt will make sure that you’re not missing anything an admissions officer will be on the lookout for.

Step 2: Brainstorm communities you’re involved in.

If you’re writing a Community essay that asks you to discuss a community you belong to, then your next step will be brainstorming all of your options.

As you brainstorm, keep a running list. Your list can include all kinds of communities you’re involved in.

Communities:

• Model United Nations
• Youth group
• Instagram book club
• My Discord group

Step 3: Think about the role(s) you play in your selected community.

Narrow down your community list to a couple of options. For each remaining option, identify the roles you played, actions you took, and significance you’ve drawn from being part of that group.

Community: Orchestra

These three columns help you get at the most important details you need to include in your community essay.

Step 4: Identify any relevant connections to the school.

Depending on the question the prompt asks of you, your last step may be to do some school research.

Let’s return to the Rice example.

After researching the Rice mission statement, we know that Rice values community members who want to contribute to the “betterment of our world.”

Ah ha! Now we have something solid to work from.

With this value in mind, I can choose to write about a perspective that shows my investment in creating a better world. Maybe that perspective is a specific kind of fundraising tenacity. Maybe it’s always looking for those small improvements that have a big impact. Maybe it’s some combination of both. Whatever it is, I can write a supplemental essay that reflects the values of the university.

Community Essay Mistakes

While writing Community essays may seem fairly straightforward, there are actually a number of ways they can go awry. Specifically, there are three common mistakes students make that you should be on the lookout for.

They don’t address the specific requests of the prompt.

As with all supplemental essays, your Community essay needs to address what the prompt is asking you to do. In Community essays especially, you’ll need to assess whether you’re being asked to talk about a community you’re already part of or the community you hope to join.

Neglecting to read the prompt also means neglecting any help the prompt gives you in terms of values. Remember that you can get clues as to what the school is looking for by analyzing the prompt’s underlying values.

They’re too vague.

Community essays can also go awry when they’re too vague. Your Community essay should reflect on specific, concrete details about your experience. This is especially the case when a Community prompt asks you to talk about a specific moment, challenge, or sequence of events.

Don’t shy away from details. Instead, use them to tell a compelling story.

They don’t make any connections to the school.

Finally, Community essays that don’t make any connections to the school in question miss out on a valuable opportunity to show school fit. Recall from our supplemental essay guide that you should always write supplemental essays with an eye toward showing how well you fit into a particular community.

Community essays are the perfect chance to do that, so try to find relevant and logical school connections to include.

Community Supplemental Essay Example

Example essay: robotics community.

University of Michigan: Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. (Required for all applicants; minimum 100 words/maximum 300 words)

From Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” videos to ZirconTV’s “How to Use a Stud Finder,” I’m a YouTube how-to fiend. This propensity for fix-it knowledge has not only served me well, but it’s also been a lifesaver for my favorite community: my robotics team(( The writer explicitly states the community they’ll be focusing on.)) . While some students spend their after-school hours playing sports or video games, I spend mine tinkering in my garage with three friends, one of whom is made of metal.

Last year, I Googled more fixes than I can count. Faulty wires, misaligned soldering, and failed code were no match for me. My friends watched in awe as I used Boolean Operators to find exactly the information I sought.(( The writer clearly articulates their place in the community.)) But as I agonized over chassis reviews, other unsearchable problems arose.

First((This entire paragraph fulfills the “describe that community” direction in the prompt.)) , there was the matter of registering for our first robotics competition. None of us familiar with bureaucracy, David stepped up and made some calls. His maturity and social skills helped us immediately land a spot. The next issue was branding. Our robot needed a name and a logo, and Connor took it upon himself to learn graphic design. We all voted on Archie’s name and logo design to find the perfect match. And finally, someone needed to enter the ring. Archie took it from there, winning us first place.

The best part about being in this robotics community is the collaboration and exchange of knowledge.((The writer emphasizes a clear strength: collaboration within their community. It’s clear that the writer values all contributions to the team.))  Although I can figure out how to fix anything, it’s impossible to google social skills, creativity, or courage. For that information, only friends will do. I can only imagine the fixes I’ll bring to the University of Michigan and the skills I’ll learn in return at part of the Manufacturing Robotics community((The writer ends with a forward-looking connection to the school in question.)) .

Want to see even more supplemental essay examples? Check out our college essay examples post . 

Liked that? Try this next.

How to Write Supplemental Essays that Will Impress Admissions Officers

How to Write a College Essay (Exercises + Examples)

Extracurricular Magnitude and Impact

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• School completion
• Access to education
• Educational demand

School community relationship

In many contexts participation of parents and communities in the operation of schools has helped increase access, retention, and attendance rates of children to school. Education is a ‘social activity in which, in addition to the school, society plays the role of a facilitator and partner’ (Sujatha, 2011: 201). Successful schools understand the importance of establishing good and harmonious relations with the community in which they lie. These relationships exist at two levels, at a formal and legal level, as well as an informal and voluntary one. The former is expressed by the representation of the community through formal organizations such as School Management Committee (SMC), Village Education Committee (VEC), School Development Committee (SDC) and/or Parent and Teachers Associations (PTA). The latter takes the form of voluntary participation, where community members get involved through special activities or events.

In order to enhance the community’s participation in education, it is essential to promote a school environment where community members feel welcomed, respected, trusted, heard, and needed.

Promising policy options

Analyse the community

The school principal must examine the community in which the school lies in order to create good relationships with its members. Communities are composed of different ethnic, religious, and socio-economic groups that may have either mutual or divergent interests. Nevertheless, a community is defined as such because certain characteristics are shared by all its members –such as geographical proximity– which differentiates them from others. Recognizing the  diversity  within the community and understanding its characteristics, power-balance components, as well as its traditions, must be a primordial step for the school principal before beginning to build the relationship.

Community, religious, political, and ethnic leaders, as well as representatives from disability groups and businesses, among others, who have significant knowledge on the community and the school, should be encouraged by the school principal and the District or Local Education Office to get involved in the school. Not only their skills, knowledge, and capacities should be analysed, but also their willingness to build a solid relationship with the school. Assessing who participated, who did not, and why is of key importance since understanding the reasons why community members are not participating in school will help overcome the barriers. For example, some community members –such as PTA members or teachers– may not participate because they do not feel legitimized, excluded, or poorly informed to do so. For instance, in South Africa: ‘many parents lack the cultural capital to participate in the decision-making process and accept the professionals’ (principals and the teachers) definition of participation in democratic decision-making’ (Grant Lewis and Naidoo, 2006: 423). Creating specific strategies to include and legitimize everyone’s intervention is, therefore, a necessity.

It is also important to analyse any previous form of participation of the community in their school. Examining whether the initiatives were successful or not and why is of key importance for future involvement.  Moreover, the risk of monopolization of partnerships by political and intellectual elites inside the community should be assessed, as well as their relationships with other community members. For instance, through a review of World Bank programmes, the domination of the partnerships between the school and the community by the local elites was highlighted as a major concern (Nielsen, 2007).

Moreover, the school principal should support the school’s personnel and most importantly, the teachers, to be open to the community’s involvement in the school. Good relationships and regular communication between the teachers and the community are fundamental.   

Adopt pertinent policy measures to encourage community’s participation in the school

At the macro-level, the participation of communities in the school is not meant to replace the State’s responsibility. In fact, it requires the government to reinforce its involvement by passing specific legislation, decrees, policies, procedures, and guidelines concerning the different structures that link the school and the community.

At the micro-level, district or local Education Offices should establish clear policies and guidelines that define the responsibilities and functions of bodies composed by community members. Ensure the availability and  accessibility  of legal texts at the school and community level. As well as give to both, school and community stakeholders, specific training on their new responsibilities and inform them precisely about the existing regulations. As Bray states: ‘Partnerships need nurturing. Skills do not develop overnight, and attitudes may take even longer to adjust’ (2001: 33).

The role of the school head, community leaders and external actors

It is essential to have a school principal with strong leadership skills and interpersonal qualities. Recurrently, it is the  school head  who triggers the participation of community members in school and maintains a good relationship with them. Therefore, his or her willingness to open the school to the community and involve it in the management process is indispensable. The  school head  must spend time and effort preparing and encouraging the community’s participation in school. In addition, s/he must share the vision and plans of the school with community members, listen to their different points of view, and invite them to collaborate in school.

Community leaders and external actors (such as NGOs) should stay active in school, as they can act as linking agents between the school and the larger community. They should maintain regular communication with the community in the name of the school.

Design and implement awareness-raising campaigns

Awareness-raising campaigns should help parents and community members know the reasons for and benefits of their participation in school. They should also be informed about the different involvement opportunities, policies, and programmes, while making sure they understand that participation is inclusive. Multiple communication tools can be used for that purpose. If multiple languages are spoken in the community, translate the information and provide oral messages for illiterate community members. It is also essential to ensure the availability and  accessibility  of legal texts concerning community’s participation in the school at community- and school-level.

Community involvement in the school should be promoted with the help of other community members and school staff. Make those actors feel responsible for the success of the outreach strategy and motivate them to persuade more community members to participate in school. It is key to maintain an open, strong, transparent, regular and effective communication with community members with the help of  School Committee  members and the  Community Development Officer  –in case there is one (his/her task is to create a link between schools, homes, and communities). As stressed by Swift-Morgan, ‘the quality of the school-community partnership is proportional to the degree of communication between the school and its community’ (2006: 356). For instance, ensure the organization of regular and open meetings about the school to share important information such as results, funds, and activities. Involve stakeholders and allow them to express their concerns, ideas, and opinions.

Providing simple and concrete initial projects is essential to get the community members involved, for instance building a wall. Hosting events and inviting parents and community members to volunteer is also another common strategy. For instance, by mentoring students during school open forums, participating in role model events and sport activities, among others (Mahuro and Hungi, 2016).

Formal involvement of community members in school

Create inclusive groups by recurring to national legislations, policies, and procedures to involve community members in school. Decide a pertinent structure for their participation, for example, School Management Committee (SMC), Village Education Committee (VEC), School Development Committee (SDC) and/or Parent and Teachers Associations (PTA). Make sure that the members of the bodies are representative of the community served by the school. Fight against the unequal access to participation due to socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, disability, political affiliation, and  gender  by defining inclusive criteria for membership –decide whether members are elected or nominated.

Define clear and mutually accepted roles and responsibilities by defining the roles, functions, responsibilities, and rights of each organization through a written statement. Conceive a clear plan of action for each structure in coordination with the other bodies, school authorities, and teachers. This is essential, and even more, when multiple structures co-exist, as a lack of clarity of assigned roles and overlaps of responsibility may become a source of conflict. Develop a culture of accountability and participation.

The involvement of community members in school is particularly useful to mobilize financial, material, and human resources. Community members can also participate in changing the community’s attitudes toward schooling.  School Committee  members can visit reluctant parents, explain the benefits of education and convince them to enrol their children to school. They may help the school authorities, as well as local and national authorities, to identify factors contributing to educational problems such as low enrolment, for instance, in Malawi, Uganda, and the United Republic of Tanzania (UNICEF, 2009:232).

Tools such as the Community-based Education Management Information Systems (C-EMIS) can be used by the community members. Indeed, the C-EMIS is a decentralized tool used by community members to collect information about marginalized children in and outside the school system, which acts as a complement to the national EMIS, and that has been piloted in countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan (with the support of Save the Children and UNICEF) (Ahuja, 2005).

Finally, long-term commitment should be enhanced through periodic meetings and regular communication. Regular meetings should be organised while keeping in mind the time so that mothers/women, as well as people who work, can attend. Keeping a record of all meetings, decisions, and the community’s financial and material contributions is key.

Refer to Annex 1 , for an example of what constitutes the School Management Committee (SMC), in India. It is a circular from the Directorate of Education, New Delhi.

For an example of what constitutes the School Management Committee (SMC), in India. It is a circular from the Directorate of Education, New Delhi.

It comprises of representation such as: 

• 50% of women in the committee.
• Proportional representation of parents/guardians of students from disadvantaged groups and weaker sections.

Source: India. 2013. Directorate of Education. Guidelines for composition of School Management Committee under the RTE Act and its functions.  

Conduct continuous M&E of school and community’s partnerships

It is essential to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the school-community partnership. The  school head  should launch periodically an assessment of the functioning and effectiveness of existing structures. Evaluate for example the number of meetings held, the variety of issues addressed, the level of authority that the formal bodies have and if the objectives have been accomplished. Communities constantly evolve, as well as their needs and demands, and so should the partnerships established between schools and community members.

Provide support and regular training

Enhancing the community’s capacities through training is essential to create effective partnerships between the school and the community. The District Education Office, through a pedagogical advisor, or external actors –such as NGOs– could accompany the school and the community in practicing their collaboration and create capacity-building opportunities.

The District Education Office should assess the capabilities of the community and provide training. Community members can be trained to create strong activism campaigns and advocacy in favour of enrolment and the benefits of education in their community. It is also important to train school staff on practical ways to work and communicate effectively with community members and parents, for instance, school committees can find volunteers to introduce teachers and other school staff to the community. Encourage them to appreciate  diversity  and reduce barriers to the community’s involvement in school.

* For more information consult Policy page  Socio-cultural barriers to schooling .

Other policy options

Participative Decision Making: encourage and allow the community to play a principal role in school governance

The decentralization movement in many countries has led to the transfer of some functions to the school level and therefore, the amplification of schools’ autonomy. In some systems, decentralization has been so profound that the decision-making authority for school operation has been transferred to actors inside the school, such as the headteachers, teachers, parents, community members participating in school and students, this is known as  school-based management  (SBM). Although SBM has been found to be effective in some contexts such as in El Salvador (EDUCO), it is necessary to research and discuss it further, as well as analyse each particular context, before implementing it.

Policy options for improving Equity and Inclusion

Gender-responsive policies.

All the different strategies mentioned in the general section of the present Policy page apply for this section . Stakeholders in charge of implementing them must make sure to take gender issues into consideration to effectively promote access and retention for all children. The following policy recommendations could be implemented to complement the aforementioned strategies.

Include a gender analysis within the community analysis

Gain a clear understanding of existent  gender roles , structures, and attitudes related to decision-making at the community level. Tackle them down to ensure an equitable engagement of community and family members within schools. Particularly, ensure women’s active participation (Derbyshire, 2002).

Equitable participation within formal structures (SMC, VEC, SDC, PTAs)

To guarantee women’s active engagement within formal structures, the following strategies are recommended:

• empower women in the community to actively participate in the school and be part of the structures in place;
• assign them real responsibilities within the structures;
• support them to embrace leadership roles;
• make meetings flexible (time and place) to ensure their attendance; and
• promote men’s positive attitudes towards women’s active participation (especially male community and religious leaders).

Provide gender-sensitive training opportunities to community and family members

Training opportunities should tackle  gender  issues affecting the participation of community members within the schools. For instance, provide special training in leadership skills, confidence building, communication skills,  gender -sensitivity, and  gender -mainstreaming.

Gear community and families’ engagement towards building inclusive, gender-responsive schools

Community and families’ active engagement in schools should be geared towards building inclusive,  gender-responsive  schools (physically, academically, and socially) as well as promoting children’s access and retention. Community and family stakeholders can contribute by:

• Developing awareness-raising campaigns to highlight the importance of schooling, tackle down socio-cultural beliefs against schooling and discriminatory  gender  norms which affect children’s education (e.g. Child marriage). For example, in southern sudan, awareness-rising on the importance of girls’ education done by community education committees, increased girls’ enrolment to 96 percent (miller-grandvaux and yoder, 2002, cited by sperling, winthrop and kwauk, 2016).
• Monitoring  attendance.
• Collecting information on children out-of-school.
• Supporting the schools and families to develop flexible timetables.
• Linking what is taught in school with children’s daily lives (practical knowledge).
• Providing safe transportation to and from school.
• Ensuring that the school is a safe, welcoming, inclusive,  gender-responsive  environment (for more information consult policy pages  school climate  and  school-related violence ). For example, in Ethiopia, the community’s engagement within schools focused on creating  gender-responsive  schools (UNESCO, 2017).
• Contributing to the establishment of monetary and non-monetary incentive programmes to support children’s attendance to school. For instance, providing scholarships, subsidies, school feeding programmes, school supplies and uniforms (for more information about this subject consult Policy pages  High direct costs  and  High opportunity costs ).

These strategies should be designed to reach the most affected children within the community –either girls, boys or  LGBTQI  children. Performing a previous  gender  analysis is recommended to ensure that the policy options selected to target the pertinent population.  

Policies for children with disabilities

Although all of the different strategies mentioned in the general section of the present Policy page apply , stakeholders in charge of implementing them must make sure they are geared towards promoting access and retention for all children, including children with disabilities. The following policy recommendations could be implemented to complement the aforementioned strategies.

Extend the education community (DPO’s, parents of children with disabilities, etc.)

Government legislation and policy, as well as schools, should consider the following groups as an integral part of the education community (UNESCO, 2009 d ):

• Disability People’s Organizations (DPOs);
• parents of children with disabilities;
• parents’ organizations; and
• community-based rehabilitation (CBR)  workers.

Ensure their representation and active engagement within formal structures (e.g. SMC, VEC, SDC, PTA) and throughout the decision-making process. For example, Malawi’s SCM includes parents of children with disabilities (Grimes, Stevens and Kumar, 2015).

Mobilize knowledge and resources

The valuable knowledge and resources of the aforementioned stakeholders should be acknowledged and mobilized by governments and schools. Getting their support to promote the understanding of  inclusion  within the community and build consensus around  inclusive education is essential. Indeed, the involvement of communities and families is a key pillar in the development of positive attitudes towards inclusive education and the promotion of a strategic framework for the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream settings (IIEP-UNESCO, 2019). Research shows that partnerships among families, communities, and schools can improve enrolment, attendance, and learning outcomes of children with disabilities in mainstream schools. For instance, in Lao People’s Democratic Republic consolidated relationships between inclusive schools and their communities contributed to significantly reduce repetition and improve attendance rates of children with disabilities (Howgego, Miles and Myers, 2014).

Advocacy and public awareness of the rights, needs, and capacities of children with disabilities is fundamental. Communities and families can act as levers for  inclusive education  in contexts where mainstream settings still deny the right of children with disabilities to access general education (UNESCO, 2009 d ). For example, as a result of the strong advocacy done by a parents’ association,  Inclusion  Panama, the Panamanian government changed the law in 2003 and introduced a new policy to make all schools inclusive (WHO, 2011). Similar actions have been done in Lesotho, South Africa and Australia (Miles, 2002). To support advocacy campaigns, low-cost documents to share information on how and why children with disabilities should access and participate in school should be conceived. Moreover, community members can support actions to identify children with disabilities out of school and persuade their families to enrol them. For example, in Viet Nam various community stakeholders came together to visit every house in communities –ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 residents– to identify children with disabilities out of school and encourage their families to enrol them (Howgego, Miles and Myers, 2014).

Additional strategies include:

• build accessible school infrastructure (consult Policy pages  School Physical infrastructure  and  Buildings are not ready );
• contribute to making  curriculum  inclusive and accessible (consult Policy page  Inadequate curriculum );
• fundraise to purchase accessible teaching and learning materials and assistive devices (consult Policy pages  Availability of teaching aids  and  Availability and content of textbooks );
• provide transport for children with disabilities to and from school;
• provide medical treatment (especially CBR programmes) and help map all existent services for children with disabilities;
• help in assisting children with specific disabilities, such as mobility impairments;
• reflect together on how to overcome existing barriers to access and learning, building more  inclusive education  systems;
• ensure that the school is a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment (for more information consult Policy pages  School climate  and  School-related violence ); and,
• assist teachers. For instance, parents can share with teachers their knowledge concerning their children’s needs. Conversely, parents can learn from teachers to continuously reinforce their children’s learning at home (UNESCO, 2001).

Moreover, whenever training opportunities for inclusive education are available, community member’s participation should be ensured. They should also be welcomed to get involved in their preparation. For instance, getting the  insight and support from DPOs when organizing and holding this type of trainings is key.

Policies for displaced populations

Foster an inclusive environment to ensure displaced community members’ involvement in the school

Engaging displaced families in the school can support the development of relationships between them, the host communities, and schools, thus facilitating the inclusion of displaced populations into mainstream settings. Yet, for this to be possible, an enabling environment promoting diversity and ‘the value of education for all members’ must be in place (IIEP-UNESCO, 2010: 107).  

A safe, inclusive environment must be developed so that displaced communities feel welcomed, encouraged, and empowered to become active members of the school. For this to happen, it is key to address any form of exclusion, discrimination, xenophobia, and racism within schools against displaced communities (Dryden-Person et al ., 2018). Moreover, social cohesion must be fostered among the entire school community by welcoming diversity, advocating for tolerance, ‘promoting the well-being of all members…foster[ing] belonging, [and] promot[ing] trust’ (Dryden-Person et al ., 2018:13; CfBT Education Trust and IIEP-UNESCO, 2009; UNESCO, 2019; UNESCO, 2018). To ensure this, particular attention must be paid to ‘explicit and implicit messaging of norms of who belongs and who does not’ (Dryden-Person et al ., 2018:13).  

To build an enabling environment, the entire school community must act as an ‘ambassador’ of diversity (BRYCS, 2018). When required, and if possible, ‘cultural liaisons’ can be put in place to ‘bridge the gap between refugee communities and the local schools’ (BRYCS, 2018: 6). This strategy has been employed in various programmes in the United States, such as the ‘Refugee Family Services School Liaison Programme in Stone Mountain, Georgia (BRYCS, 2018). Overall, school-level actions must be backed by an enabling national policy and legal framework (CfBT Education Trust and IIEP-UNESCO, 2009).  

Ensure host and displaced community members’ involvement in schools

School staff, local education authorities, host community members and displaced populations must work together to ensure the right to education of displaced children (UNHCR, 2001). Displaced community members should be encouraged to get involved in mainstream schools as it ‘facilitates the identification of community-specific education issues and strategies that are effective in addressing them’ (CfBT Education Trust and IIEP-UNESCO, 2009: 2). The host community should also take part ‘in the education response towards the inclusion of refugees in the education system and the host community’ (UNESCO, 2019: 72).  

The following aspects must be taken into consideration to ensure everyone’s participation in schools decision-making processes: 

• Empower host community members and displaced populations to play an active role in the school’s decision-making process (INEE, 2008).  
• Set up Community Education Committees.  Clarify roles and responsibilities (INEE, 2003; INEE, 2008; UNCHR, 2001; IIEP-UNESCO, 2010). Ensure elected members are representative of the entire population, particularly of internally displaced populations, refugees, and asylum-seekers. Include ‘different political, religious and ethnic groups, as well as traditional leaders, parents, teachers, and students’ (INEE, 2003: 2). 
• Support the establishment of regular and positive communication between the school head, teachers, host and displaced community members and parents, as well as involved developing partners (UNHCR, 2001).  
• Translate documents in all relevant languages and ensure the presence of interpreters in school meetings so that all displaced community members can actively participate (BRYCS, 2018). This can be done with the help of development agencies, refugee organisations, as well as displaced community members speaking the host community language (BRYCS, 2018). 
• Ensure flexible timetables so that everyone can participate in meetings and decision-making processes (BRYCS, 2018).  
• Provide transportation, whenpossible, so that displaced and host community members can attend the meetings (BRYCS, 2018).  
• Other strategies such as childcare can also be provided when possible (BRYCS, 2018). 

Other areas in which host and displaced community members can support schools

Community members can help ensure displaced children’s access and retention in schools, as well as improve their learning outcomes. For this purpose, it is key that community members understand the factors behind the non-enrolment and drop-out of displaced children, so that they can support schools and educational authorities in addresing them (UNHCR, 2001). For instance, community initiatives have been developed to ensure Syrian refugee’s access to schools, including ‘mobilization efforts, transportation for children, advocacy using radio and other forms of media, peer-to-peer mobilization, and engagement with religious leaders’ (Centre for Lebanese Studies, UNHCR and UNICEF MENA Regional Office Access, 2015: 16).  

Community members and the school staff can reflect together on how to overcome existing barriers to access and learning faced by displaced children, as well as build more  inclusive education  systems. Host and displaced community members can support schools in developing ‘school-level actions plans’ that ‘include clear steps to ensure learners attend classes and have the support to be active and successful participants of their own learning process’ (INEE, 2010: 36). They can also provide support to school staff and educational authorities in the following areas to ensure the right to quality education of displaced populations: 

• Develop teaching and learning materials locally (consult Policy page  Availability of teaching aids and   Textbook availability and content ); 
• build and maintain accessible, secure school infrastructure (consult Policy pages  School infrastructure  and  School buildings are not ready ); 
• contribute to developing an inclusive  curriculum , which takes into account cultural particularities (consult Policy page  Equity-sensitive curriculum ); 
• provide transport for students living in camps or remote areas; 
• provide medical treatment and routine health check-ups; and, 
• ensure that the school is a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment (for more information consult Policy pages   School climate   and   School violence ).  

Community members can also implement monitoring activities to track displaced student’s access and retention in schools, the quality of their teaching and learning processes, the maintenance and safety of schools’ infrastructure and facilities hosting them, as well as school management and finances (INEE, 2003; Centre for Lebanese Studies, UNHCR and UNICEF MENA Regional Office Access, 2015). 

Provide support and regular training to displaced communities

As expressed in the general section of the present Policy page, enhancing the community’s capacities through training is essential to create effective partnerships with the school and ensure their active participation. Training opportunities should ‘assess community capacity and identify training needs and ways to address these needs’ (IIEP-UNESCO, 2010: 127). This can include training in school management, ‘participatory management and design, prioritisation of needs, project design and implementation, financial accountability and leadership’ among others (INEE, 2003: 2).  

Training opportunities must also provide information on how the education system works and how community members and parents can get involved in schools (BRYCS, 2018). For example, UNICEF Somalia created an illustrated book for community leaders and parents ‘indicating how they can contribute to the quality of school life’ (UNHCR, 2001: 19). The German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) refugee education programme in Pakistan also developed a manual on how community mobilisation can support schooling (UNHCR, 2001). 

Design and implement awareness-raising campaigns targeting displaced populations

As explained in the general section of the present Policy page, awareness-raising campaigns are essential to help parents and community members know the reasons for and benefits of their participation in school. It is key that those campaigns focus on displaced communities’ involvement in schools as well as displaced children’s enrolment in mainstream settings. To be effective, they must be translated into pertinent languages and address any negative attitudes of displaced populations towards schooling, as those aspects have ‘a great impact on the child’s enrolment, persistence, and attainment’ (UNHCR, 2001: 93). They must also support displaced children’s enrolment in mainstream settings and dismantle any prejudices or any negative reactions from the host community. For instance, in Greece, public information events were organised with the support of parents, teachers, local authorities and ministries involved in the inclusion of refugees in schools to ‘avoid negative reactions against the participation of refugee children in the Greek educational system’ (Greece, 2017: 79).  

Educational authorities and school staff should also be provided with training on community involvement and cultural awareness (MALDEF and NEA, 2010). As expressed by MALDEF and NEA school boards must be encouraged ‘to adopt a policy that requires all teachers and administrators to have at least one unit/course of learning on parent engagement with an emphasis on cultural, linguistic, immigration, and ethnic issues.,… community engagement, ethnic minority involvement, cultural awareness, relationship building skills, and racial/social justice parent engagement learning models’ (MALDEF and NEA, 2010: 40). 

Policies for minority populations

A wide multitude of research has put into evidence the positive impact that community’s and family’s engagement in schools has on student’s enrolment, retention, learning and welfare (Backer et al. 1997; Edwards and Warin 1999; Senechal and LeFevre 2002, as cited in Flecha, 2015). This impact is even higher when it comes to minority students (Boscardin and Jacobson 1996; Beckman et al. 1998; Aubert and Valls 2003; Gómez and Vargas 2003; Driessen et al. 2005; Ringold et al. 2005, as cited in Flecha, 2015). It is therefore essential for schools –to which minority students attend– to foster positive relationships with the respective communities and family members. The following strategies can be implemented for that purpose, in complement to the ones mentioned in the general section of the present Policy page, as well as the gender-responsive section and the one for children with disabilities.   

Foster minority populations’ involvement in educational decision-making processes

To ensure the right to education of minority populations there must be adequate communication between educational authorities and school stakeholders with targeted communities –or their representatives (The World Bank, 2019; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009). Moreover, consultations and involvement of minority groups must be ensured from the onset and throughout any official educational project targeting them. This is not always the case, indeed, a Special Rapporteur for the United Nations Human Rights Council highlighted that a key challenge raised by indigenous peoples regarding their right to education was: ‘the lack of consultation on the development and implementation of educational services provided to’ them (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009: 19).  

Depending on the context, ad-hoc consultations may be necessary at first. Normally, ‘government and international agencies arrange for consultations with indigenous leaders and communities in the locations where they plan to implement school infrastructure, education and other projects’ (ADB, 2011: 35).  This can be done in different manners. For example, in Bangladesh, the ‘Indigenous Peoples Network Forum’ has been organised to discuss issues regarding indigenous peoples (ADB, 2011).  

In the long-term, however, it is key to move from ad-hoc consultations towards systematised, institutionalised, consultation processes to ensure shared-decision making processes (ADB, 2011). Indeed, the UN Human Rights Council highlights that ‘shared-decision making and involvement of community leaders and parents is critical to the successful implementation of indigenous peoples’ [and other minorities’] right to education’ (2009: 19). To ensure this, consultative bodies or ‘special task forces’ representative of indigenous peoples and other minority populations can be set up (ADB, 2011: 35). For instance, in the Australian Capital Territory, an Indigenous Education Consultative Body was formed to support an Indigenous Education Programme (ADB, 2011). That body, composed of representatives of indigenous communities and parents, provided support and advised educational officials throughout the implementation of the educational programme (ADB, 2011).  

At the macro-level, as explained in the general section of the present Policy page, the participation of communities in school must be supported by the government through specific legislation, decrees, policies, procedures, and guidelines. It is key that those documents adequately target minority’s participation in schools (MALDEF and NEA, 2010). For this purpose, it is essential that central and local levels ‘review, assess, and revise parent involvement and engagement policies annually to ensure that issues of poverty, limited English proficiency… and varying cultural expectation barriers among different ethnicities are addressed’ (MALDEF and NEA, 2010: 39). It is also essential to provide sufficient funds to schools to ensure community’s participation (MALDEF and NEA, 2010).  

At the micro-level, it is key to guarantee that formal decision-making organisations, such as school management committees (SMC) and Parent and Teachers Associations (PTA), adequately integrate, encourage, and consider minorities’ points of view (ADB, 2011). The organisation’s culture should be one in which ‘all voices will be considered, and all committee members are equally important’ (Flecha, 2015: 56). Fostering diversity is key not only for all educational processes, but also to address discrimination and prejudice, and promote social cohesion within the community (Flecha, 2015).   

The following recommendations must be considered to ensure minority’s population engagement in the decision-making processes: 

• Flexible timetables must be provided to ensure everyone’s participation in meetings and the decision-making processes (Flecha, 2015).  
• Translation must be provided when necessary to ‘ensure that minority groups are also represented and can participate equally’ (Flecha, 2015: 58). For instance, in Finland minority families are engaged in ‘Parents’ evenings’, a space for school decision-making processes, in which various interpreters are present (Flecha, 2015). Community members can also be encouraged to act as interpreters (MALDEF and NEA, 2010). 

Foster minority populations’ involvement in school’s teaching and learning processes

Minority parents and community’s involvement in teaching and learning processes have been found beneficial for three main aspects: they can increase student’s learning achievements, they can help address prejudices and discrimination and foster social cohesion, and they can support the inclusion of traditional ways of teaching and learning within schools (Darling-Hammond and Cook-Harvey, 2018; Flecha, 2015; MALDEF and NEA, 2010; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009).  

Research findings show that parental and community’s involvement in students’ learning processes lead to improved learning outcomes (Darling-Hammond and Cook-Harvey, 2018; Flecha, 2015; MALDEF and NEA, 2010). Indeed, case studies, particularly those of the United Kingdom and Spain, included in Flecha’s book, showed how parental involvement in children’s learning process led to ‘the improved acquisition of the basic competencies included in the curriculum but also in positive effects on other aspects, such as reduced absenteeism and increased enrolment’ (2015: 54).  

In addition to improving learning achievements, parental and community’s participation in classrooms is an effective strategy to welcome diversity, and ‘overcome cultural and gender stereotypes’ (Christou and Puigvert, 2011, as cited in Flecha, 2015: 50). Thus, community involvement in schools can support the creation of an inclusive, culturally responsive climate, as well as foster social cohesion (Flecha, 2015).  

Another benefit of including minorities in schools is that they can support the integration of traditional ways of teaching into mainstream institutions. Traditional leaders, minority community elders and minority families can be encouraged to come to school to teach students their traditional ways of teaching and learning, which is particularly relevant aspect for indigenous communities (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009). Such processes can also be supported by community’s learning centres –when they exist (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009). For instance, in the Philippines, the Talaandig School of Living Tradition and in Malaysia Community Learning Centres propagate traditional ways of learning within the communities (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009).  

Other areas in which minority’s populations can support schools

In addition to being involved in decision-making processes and teaching and learning processes, minority populations can also get involved in aspects such as: 

• Developing curriculum, teaching and learning materials (TLM), and teaching aids. Minority communities’ help can be particularly relevant in verifying their quality as well as ensuring adequate translations (Council of Europe, 2020; Flecha, 2015).  
• Ensuring safe, free of violence, welcoming, inclusive school environments (UNICEF and Religions for Peace, 2011).  
• Protecting students and accompanying them in case of long walking distances to school.  
• Supporting the construction, rehabilitation, and maintenance of adequate, inclusive and gender-responsive school infrastructure, facilities, and furniture (ADB, 2011; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009).  

Provide support and regular training to minority communities

As expressed in the general section of the present Policy page, enhancing the community’s capacities through training is essential to create effective partnerships between the school and the community. Training opportunities should include strategies to ensure minority populations’ active participation within school committees. For instance, a work done by the University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School with cast and minority parents from Northern Karnataka, India, found that minorities in schools were only passive members in committees (University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School, 2018). To ensure their active participation, they developed a training programme to ‘empower people to engage with education’ and equip them ‘with the skills to assert themselves when there are more powerful people present’ (University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School, 2018: 1).  Training opportunities should also be provided to teach them how to monitor education programmes, as well as on their rights and responsibilities (MALDEF and NEA, 2010).  

Educational authorities and school staff should also be provided with training on community involvement and cultural awareness (MALDEF and NEA, 2010). As expressed by MALDEF and NEA school boards must be encouraged ‘to adopt a policy that requires all teachers and administrators to have at least one unit/course of learning on parent engagement with an emphasis on cultural, linguistic, immigration, and ethnic issues.,… community engagement, ethnic minority involvement, cultural awareness, relationship building skills, and racial/social justice parent engagement learning models’ (MALDEF and NEA, 2010: 40). Overall, school-level actions must be backed by an enabling national policy and legal framework (CfBT Education Trust and IIEP-UNESCO, 2009). 

Design and implement awareness-raising campaigns targeting minority populations

As explained in the general section of the present Policy page, awareness-raising campaigns should be developed to help parents and community members know the reasons for and benefits of their participation in school. It is key that those campaigns tackle minority populations and are translated into all relevant languages (MALDEF and NEA, 2010).  

*For more information about awareness-raising campaigns consult the general section of the present Policy page.  

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How to Write the “Community” Essay

A step-by-step guide to this popular supplemental prompt.

When college admissions officers admit a new group of freshmen, they aren’t just filling up classrooms — they’re also crafting (you guessed it) a campus community. College students don’t just sit quietly in class, retreat to their rooms to crank out homework, go to sleep, rinse, and repeat. They socialize! They join clubs! They organize student protests! They hold cultural events! They become RAs and audition for a cappella groups and get on-campus jobs! Colleges want to cultivate a thriving, vibrant, uplifting campus community that enriches students’ learning — and for that reason, they’re understandably curious about what kind of community member they’ll be getting when they invite you to campus as part of their incoming class.

Enter the “community” essay — an increasingly popular supplemental essay prompt that asks students to talk about a community to which they belong and how they have contributed to or benefited from that community. Community essays often sound something like this:

University of Michigan: Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. (250 words)

Pomona College: Reflecting on a community that you are part of, what values or perspectives from that community would you bring to Pomona?  (250 words)

University of Rochester: Spiders are essential to the ecosystem. How are you essential to your community or will you be essential in your university community? (350-650 words)

Swarthmore: Swarthmore students’ worldviews are often forged by their prior experiences and exposure to ideas and values. Our students are often mentored, supported, and developed by their immediate context—in their neighborhoods, communities of faith, families, and classrooms. Reflect on what elements of your home, school, or community have shaped you or positively impacted you. How have you grown or changed because of the influence of your community? (250 words)

Yale: Reflect on a time when you have worked to enhance a community to which you feel connected. Why have these efforts been meaningful to you? You may define community however you like. (400 words)

Step 1: Pick a community to write about

Breathe. You belong to LOTS of communities. And if none immediately come to mind, it’s only because you need to bust open your idea of what constitutes a “community”!

Among other things, communities can be joined by…

• West Coasters
• NYC’s Koreatown
• Everyone in my cabin at summer camp
• ACLU volunteers
• Cast of a school musical
• Puzzle-lovers
• Powerlifters
• Army brats who live together on a military base
• Iranian-American
• Queer-identifying
• Children of pastors

Take 15 minutes to write down a list of ALL the communities you belong to that you can think of. While you’re writing, don’t worry about judging which ones will be useful for an essay. Just write down every community that comes to mind — even if some of them feel like a stretch.

When you’re done, survey your list of communities. Do one, two, or three communities jump out as options that could enable you to write about yourself and your community engagement? Carry your top choices of community into Step 2.

Step 2: Generate content.

For each of your top communities, answer any of the following questions that apply:

• Is there a memorable story I can tell about my engagement with this community?
• What concrete impacts have I had on this community?
• What problems have I solved (or attempted to solve) in this community?
• What have I learned from this community?
• How has this community supported me or enriched my life up to this point?
• How have I applied the lessons or values I gleaned from this community more broadly?

Different questions will be relevant for different community prompts. For example, if you’re working on answering Yale’s prompt, you’ll want to focus on a community on which you’ve had a concrete impact. But if you’re trying to crack Swarthmore’s community essay, you can prioritize communities that have impacted YOU. Keep in mind though — even for a prompt like Yale’s, which focuses on tangible impact, it’s important that your community essay doesn’t read like a rattled-off list of achievements in your community. Your goal here is to show that you are a generous, thoughtful, grateful, and active community member who uplifts the people around you — not to detail a list of the competitions that Math club has won under your leadership.

BONUS: Connect your past community life to your future on-campus community life.

Some community essay prompts ask you — or give you the option — to talk about how you plan on engaging with community on a particular college campus. If you’re tackling one of those prompts (like Pomona’s), then you guessed it: it’s research time!

Often, for these kinds of community prompts, it will serve you to first write about a community that you’ve engaged with in the past and then write about how you plan to continue engaging with that same kind of community at college. For example, if you wrote about throwing a Lunar New Year party with international students at your high school, you might write about how excited you are to join the International Students Alliance at your new college or contribute to the cross-cultural student magazine. Or, if you wrote about playing in your high school band, you might write about how you can’t wait to audition for your new college’s chamber orchestra or accompany the improv team for their improvised musicals. The point is to give your admissions officer an idea of what on-campus communities you might be interested in joining if you were to attend their particular school.

Check out our full College Essay Hub for tons of resources and guidance on writing your college essays. Need more personalized guidance on brainstorming or crafting your supplemental essays? Contact our college admissions team.

Caroline Hertz

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A Reflective Essay on Creating a Community-of-Learning in a Large Lecture-Theatre Based University Course

• Published: 23 June 2020
• Volume 55 , pages 363–377, ( 2020 )

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• Huibert P. de Vries 1 &
• Sanna Malinen 1  

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“Community” It’s everywhere! In thousands of geographical locations throughout the land people gather in small, medium, and large groups (or dispersed associations) for some common purpose. (Lenning and Ebbers 1999 , p. 17)

The benefits of creating learning communities have been clearly established in educational literature. However, the research on ‘community-of-learning’ has largely focused on intermediate and high-school contexts and on the benefits of co-facilitation in the classroom. In this paper, we contribute to educational research by describing an approach for a large (1000 + students/year), lecture-theatre based, university management course. This approach largely excludes co-facilitation, but offers a unified and integrated approach by staff to all other aspects of running the course. By applying an ethnographic methodology, our contribution to the ‘community-of-learning’ literature is a set of strategies that enable a sense of belonging and collective ownership amongst all participants in the course. We describe the experienced benefits, as well as challenges, of such teaching, as we outline the methods we use to enhance students’ perception of belonging to a community-of-learning. We conclude by making recommendations as to the requirements of adopting a community-of-learning teaching approach to tertiary education.

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de Vries, H.P., Malinen, S. A Reflective Essay on Creating a Community-of-Learning in a Large Lecture-Theatre Based University Course. NZ J Educ Stud 55 , 363–377 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-020-00165-1

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Engaging the Community on a Personal Level

To encourage strong, meaningful links with the community, consider this strategy from a former principal, which can lead to lasting rewards.

Principals have full plates of responsibilities and tasks that routinely occupy and consume their daily schedule. Despite this, they need to make sure they don’t neglect the importance of community engagement, especially partnerships in education. To highlight that endeavor, I’ve put together a plan and program outline that can be replicated or adapted depending upon the setting.

Start by researching and reading about successful programs established by other principals. Publications from state and national professional principals’ associations are good, informative sources. Then, request that your district leaders convene all building-level administrators to brainstorm and discuss the many ways to develop and shape school-community partnerships to support individual schools. 

Strong partnerships can provide assistance and resources that can help principals and their staff address the needs of students, parents, and families in ways that are typically not available from schools alone, ultimately strengthening the surrounding community.

Reciprocal rewards

During my experience, as an outcome of such a planning meeting, principals were encouraged to identify and reach out to an individual in the community, preferably in the school’s attendance area, whom they could invite to their school to shadow the principal for the day, or as much of the day as possible. That guest would then schedule a time at their place of business for the principal to reciprocate and shadow them.

Prior to the shadowing visits, principals outlined for their guests what could and could not be observed, primarily focused on issues of confidentiality pertaining to students and staff. But the primary objective was to open the school to a representative of the community, share a typical day, and freely allow that person to see for themselves what the role of the principal really looked like and felt like, and how the principal structured and influenced operations. The same observations and insights were part of the principal’s visit to the guest’s place of work.

Mutual visits and shadowing between principals and their invited guests were scheduled within the same month of the year—for instance, October, which the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) celebrates as National Principals Month. Good programs should be replicated every five to 10 years.  

Additionally, it’s possible to expand the idea by coordinating and including principals in other districts, or perhaps an entire state, by creating a proposal for the state’s principals’ professional association. The Ohio Association of Elementary School Administrators (OAESA) developed such an endeavor in the late 1990s—SWAP (Supervision with a Principal)—to great success.

To culminate the shadowing experience, a districtwide, expenses-paid luncheon gave principals and their guests the opportunity to share their observations, be publicly recognized, and further strengthen the relationships. The statements from many of the SWAP participants (which included the mayor, a county commissioner, bankers, lawyers, and many influential businesspeople) were surprising. Many stated that they were exhausted within a couple of hours and surprised by the constant mobility of principals in their schools. In many cases, the visits proved to be the impetus of long-lasting systems of support.   

Long-Term Benefits

My invited guest operated a food pantry and men’s homeless shelter within three blocks of my school. Following his visit, I spent time with him at the shelter and volunteered to be the supervisor for several nights. In the weeks and months that followed, we engaged in follow-up conversations, particularly centered around strategies that would support the development of students in my school, many of whom were from unstable families living in his neighborhood. My “shadow” was committed to doing whatever he could to ultimately help all children reach adulthood avoiding any paths toward homelessness.

Those discussions led to the development of the West After School Center (WASC) in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1997. The WASC became an after-school tutoring program, coordinated by my “shadow” and supported by community volunteers. It developed and grew, all as a result of our SWAP experience and the strong mutual relationship we built, along with many other community leaders who wanted in on the action.   

The partnership continuously strengthened and expanded. The volunteers formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, acquiring grants and resources well beyond what I ever dreamed would be possible. Most important, however, was the human resource support—more than 100 community volunteers who provided after-school tutoring to approximately 20 percent of our neediest students.  

Within five years of the initial SWAP experience, the WASC Board of Directors had purchased property across the street from the school and constructed a community center. The group played a lead role in helping other district schools acquire grants and other forms of support for after-school programming.

Ultimately, because of the diligent work from a committed school staff and the various forms of support from additional community partnerships that were subsequently formed, West School students earned the highest reading scores in the first, third, and sixth grades in the district within six years of the SWAP visit.

Jamie Vollmer, in his book Schools Cannot Do It Alone , shares his journey from outspoken critic to strong supporter of public schools. I recommend the book as you begin contemplating strategies that will increase your community engagement practices.

There might be others like him with a more cynical view of what happens in our schools, perhaps right outside your door. Invite them for a SWAP visit. When they are authentically permitted to see with their own eyes what really takes place in your school, they may return with ideas and offers of support that will change lives, and perceptions, forever. 

Collaborating to transform and improve education systems: A playbook for family-school engagement

By Rebecca Winthrop, Adam Barton, Mahsa Ershadi, and Lauren Ziegler

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This playbook on family-school collaboration makes the case for why family engagement is essential for education systems transformation and why families and schools must have a shared understanding of what a good quality education looks like. By providing evidence-based strategies from around the world and other hands-on tools that school leaders and partners can adopt and use in their local contexts, it aims to help leapfrog education inequality so that all young people can have a 21st-century education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put the topic of families and schools working together to educate children at the center of virtually every country’s education debate. Teachers around the world report developing creative ways of engaging with parents to help their students learn at home, including strategies they would like to continue even after pandemic is over (Teach for All, 2020; Teach for Pakistan, 2020). In turn, parents—whom we define as any family members or guardians who are the primary caregivers (see Box 1 for important terms defined)—have responded to these new remote-learning experiences and new forms of communication. Their increased expectations of deeper engagement with schools are reflected in representative surveys of parents across Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States—all pointing to this rising demand from families for new approaches to working with schools ( Learning Heroes, 2020; Molina et al., 2020).

Many leaders of schools and school systems across the world had an “aha” moment when, after pivoting to new outreach and communication mechanisms, they saw major jumps in the level of engagement of families, especially among those who had been previously deemed hard to reach. From Argentina to India to the United States, leaders realized that hard-to-reach families were not opposed to engaging with schools; it was just that the schools’ approaches to engagement were getting in the way. For example, when the government of Himachal Pradesh, a state of almost 7 million people in India, pivoted from asking parents to come to schools for meetings to finding multiple ways for schools to come to parents —through text messages, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook posts—engagement levels jumped from 20 percent to 80 percent in two months (Brookings Institution, 2021).

I felt like I knew more during the school closures what my child had been learning than the entire three and a half other years she’s been in school. Parent, United States

The four goals

This new focus on ways to connect families with schools presents an opportunity to markedly shift broader approaches, and the overall vision, for long-term collaboration. This playbook shows that family-school engagement—namely the collaboration between the multiple actors, from parents and community members to teachers and school leaders—has an important role to play in improving and transforming education systems to achieve four main goals (Figure 1):

• Parent and family: In this playbook, “parent” is shorthand for any family member, caregiver, or guardian who cares for children and youth. We rely most heavily on the term “family” to capture the varied contexts in which children live and are cared for, including extended family members—from grandparents to aunts, uncles, or cousins—who play leading roles in caregiving. The playbook uses the terms “parent” and “family” interchangeably.
• Teacher: The playbook uses “teacher” instead of “educator” to distinguish between the education professional (whose vocation is to instruct and guide children in school) and parents (who are their child’s first educators, helping them develop and learn from birth on).
• Involvement versus engagement: We find Ferlazzo’s distinction between family “involvement” and “engagement” helpful and use the terms accordingly. “A school striving for family involvement often leads with its mouth—identifying projects, needs, and goals and then telling parents how they can contribute.” In contrast, “a school striving for parent engagement leads with its ears—listening to what parents think, dream, and worry about. The goal of family engagement is not to serve clients but to gain partners” (Ferlazzo, 2011, p. 12).
• Family-school engagement: This playbook uses the term “family-school engagement” instead of the more common “family engagement” not only to express the dual nature of the engagement but also to highlight the fact that either side can, and does, initiate the engagement process.
• Alignment and the alignment gap: When families and schools share the same vision of the purpose of school, they are aligned in their beliefs and values, and this coherence is a powerful driver of education system transformation. An “alignment gap” exists when families and schools either do not share or perceive that they do not share the same views on the purpose of school and therefore what makes for a quality education for their children and communities.
• Schools and education systems: “School” denotes children’s structured process of teaching and learning regardless of location (whether a school building, outdoors, a library, a museum, or home). “Education systems” comprise schools but also frequently include a range of actors in the community (such as parks, employers, or nonprofit programs) that can work with schools to provide an ecosystem of learning opportunities. Education systems can have different levels of jurisdiction (district, state, or national) that denote their limits of authority. Although governments in every country bear the responsibility for ensuring that all children, especially from marginalized communities, can access a quality education, this playbook also refers to nongovernmental school networks (for example, a private school chain or a nonprofit network) as jurisdictions.
• System improvement: Certain efforts maximize how a system delivers education against the existing vision and set of outcomes. They aim to achieve the first two goals defined in this playbook: (a) improve student attendance and completion, and (b) improve student learning and development.
• System transformation: Other efforts broaden engagement to redefine the purpose of an education system, hence shifting the beliefs and mindsets that guide it along with the operations that deliver on that vision. They aim to achieve the second two goals defined in this playbook: (a) redefine the purpose of school for students, and (b) redefine the purpose of school for society.

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Improving education systems

Robust evidence shows that family-school engagement can significantly improve how systems serve their students, especially those who have been poorly served. Studies that primarily assess school improvement have looked at students’ educational outcomes as measured by attendance; completion; and achievement on literacy, numeracy, and other regularly assessed competencies. We classify these efforts as system “improvement” because they improve how the system delivers education against an established set of outcomes rather than shifting the overall vision of the system’s purpose. Several such studies find that family-school engagement, when implemented effectively, not only boosts student outcomes but also can be a highly cost-effective investment.

Our students come from very challenging backgrounds, so we cannot focus only on academics. I feel it is necessary for teachers to spend some time bonding with students. It is very important for me to bond with their families as the difficulties faced by the families are also related to my child’s background. As a teacher, I feel having this complete triangle connected to each other is very important. Teacher, India

Schools with strong family engagement are 10 times more likely to improve student learning outcomes. In one longitudinal study across 200 public elementary schools in Chicago (Bryk, 2010), researchers identified five key supports that together determined whether schools could substantially improve students’ reading and math scores: school leadership, family and community engagement, education personnel capacity, school learning climate, and instructional guidance. Crucially, schools improved most when all five supports were present. A sustained weakness in even one of these elements led schools to stagnate, showing little improvement.

The important role family-school engagement plays in improving students’ achievement is also broadly supported by other research, including a meta-analysis of 52 studies that found that engaging parents in their children’s schooling leads to improved grades for students in their classes and on standardized tests (Jeynes, 2007).

Communicating with families can be one of the most highly cost-effective approaches. Robust family engagement, as a core pillar of improving schools, certainly requires investment to shift mindsets and behaviors, but one particular component of this effort—direct communication with families—is a highly cost-effective way of improving student attendance and learning outcomes. A global study comparing evaluations of different types of education interventions (such as teacher training, materials provision, scholarships) across 46 low- and middle-income countries found sharing information about education to be at the top of the list in terms of cost-effectiveness (Angrist et al., 2020). The study showed that a particular approach to communicating information is what improves student outcomes at scale, namely context-specific information about the benefits, costs, and quality of local schooling from a messenger that families and students trust. For example, data that help families and their children to better assess the specific benefits of staying and doing well in school (like higher earnings and better health) as well as to better identify resources that could help students participate in higher education and understand the quality of schooling options available to them. In fact, targeted information campaigns about the benefits of education for students can deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality education for a low per student cost.

The Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel identified communicating with families in this manner, including through videos or parents’ meetings at school, as a “great buy” for education systems. For a modest investment, it can significantly improve student outcomes on important dimensions such as years of schooling and acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills across a large number of communities (Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, 2020).

Transforming education systems

The increased attention to family-school engagement also provides an opportunity for a broader debate and dialogue on the overall purpose of school. Families not only have increased expectations for ongoing engagement but also, in many contexts, have had front-row seats inside the schooling process during the COVID-19 pandemic and have opinions on what a quality education should look like for their children.

These discussions on the purpose of school would, of course, include an examination of strategies to ensure that students are attending school and learning well there. But they would also allow parents and families and teachers and schools to take a step back and ask each other, “What are schools for? What role should they play in society? And what types of competencies and skills should schools help our children develop?”

No institution or one actor can reinvent the education system by themselves. So you need to spend the time to develop an answer to the question: What is it that we want for our children in this community? Only once we agree on where we’re trying to go, can we then work in coordination and know what our respective roles are. Developing this shared vision is what good leaders do. District superintendent, United States

We refer to this broader engagement on the guiding vision of education as system “transformation” work because it does not take the current education system outcomes as a given. Although the family engagement literature offers only a limited focus on engaging families with this goal in mind, the system transformation field offers substantial insight on the important role family-school engagement plays in this process—and what it takes to achieve this engagement.

Redefining the purpose of education—one of the most powerful levers for sustainably transforming systems—requires participation by the whole community. Systems of any kind—education, health, or justice—are made up of many elements, from the concrete and visible (like people and resources) to the abstract and invisible (like group priorities and culture). Scholars of system dynamics point to changing “deep structures,” which include the invisible elements of a system like values and beliefs, as one of the most effective ways to transform what systems do (Gersick, 1991; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). They argue that frequently, when leaders seek to change the concrete or visible elements of a system without changing the deep structures of beliefs and values that guide that system, the results amount to tinkering around the edges. Conversely, a shift in the beliefs and values that guide a system drives changes across the visible and invisible elements alike (Meadows, 2008; Munro et al., 2002).

In this way, aligning around a shared vision of the purpose of school is a powerful way for schools and families to shape the deep structures guiding how schools operate. For example, in communities where families or teachers or students have different beliefs about what school is for and hence what they should do , schools are likely to struggle, being pulled in multiple directions or experiencing considerable headwinds to any changes that are made. In contrast, communities with a well-aligned vision of the purpose of school can move forward constructively, with families, teachers, students, and others all playing their respective roles in helping to advance this vision. This type of family-school engagement has the added benefit of helping sustain a vision of quality schooling across multiple political cycles. An Achilles’ heel of education system change is the short tenure of leaders. In Latin America, for example, most education ministers are only in office for an average of two to three years, which frequently means a revolving door of priorities guiding the system (Fiszbein & Saccucci, 2016).

Deep dialogue with families and schools is needed to unlock systemwide transformational processes. One study examined the greatest barriers to and enablers of systemwide change, tracking reform journeys across three countries: Canada, Finland, and Portugal (Barton, 2021). In all three cases, the primary barrier was a misalignment between members of the community—from education leaders to teachers to families—on their beliefs and values about school. They lacked a shared sense of “this is what school is about.” In all three countries, a process of deep and respectful dialogue, whereby families and schools along with others had equal places at the table, was crucial for unlocking the system transformation process. The study concludes that collectively defining and aligning the purpose of education, and the values that drive it, are among the essential enablers of systemwide transformation. This study reaffirms prior findings from U.S.-based research: education reforms are only successful when, among other things, they are consistent with stakeholders’ values, in other words when they are aligned to students, parents, and teachers’ beliefs about education (Cohen and Mehta, 2017).

A changing world

The COVID-19 pandemic has not been the first and will not be the last external force driving a need to change education systems. Strategies for families and communities to work together across all four goals of system improvement or transformation are needed now, particularly to address the growing inequality that has emerged from the pandemic. But they will also be needed in the future to navigate the skills needed for a rapidly changing world.

There is a growing consensus among education experts and learning scientists that education systems must focus more heavily on ensuring that students develop a wide range of competencies—from robust academic knowledge, to “learning how to learn,” to collaborative problem solving. Many also agree that to develop this breadth of skills and deliver a holistic education, teaching and learning experiences must shift to include more experiential, playful, real-world application of academic learning (Winthrop et al., 2018). The forces that are already pushing education systems in this direction are set to accelerate over the coming decades. They include the advent of new technologies, the disruption of the world of work through automation of routine manual and cognitive skills, and the seriousness of complex social and environmental crises.

Although we subscribe to the argument that the fast pace of change requires education systems to improve and transform toward a more holistic vision of education and have written extensively on this before, we recognize that when it comes to family-school engagement, prescribing a vision undercuts the very power of the engagement process. For example, the deep dialogue needed to redefine the purpose of schools can only occur if parents and families and teachers and schools have an equal voice, whereby each brings their respective expertise to the table, and there is a level of trust that allows for the cocreation of a shared vision. We also realize that every context is different and together families, education professionals, students, and other stakeholders should be the ones to decide what a quality education looks like for them given their culture, history, aspirations, and community realities.

This is why this playbook focuses on offering ways of understanding the full landscape of family-school engagement strategies so that communities may learn from each other but ultimately with the goal of adapting and making strategies relevant in their own contexts. It is also why, to complement this landscape of strategies, we have provided an in-depth look at one of the system transformation goals: “redefine the purpose of school for students.” Current family-school engagement work has focused much less energy and attention on transforming education systems than on improving them, and deepening the field’s understanding of how to approach this goal is one way of addressing this gap.

Playbook contributions

This playbook includes six main components:

• Overview: We describe the four goals for family-school engagement (two goals for improving how systems serve students and two goals for transforming how systems are envisioned). The section provides context for family-school engagement in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and explains who should use the playbook.
• Evolution: This section discusses the evolving nature of family-school engagement. Historically, schools were never designed to engage families in the education of their children and we discuss the three main barriers facing family-school engagement today. We highlight the evolving story of good practice in family-school engagement from episodic involvement to continuous engagement.
• Strategy landscape: This section provides an overview of the good practice strategies that stakeholders can use to improve family-school engagement. It is a typology, or “map,” for understanding the breadth of family-school engagement approaches for achieving each of the four goals and highlights findings from our review of over 500 strategies.
• Strategy Finder: This interactive database features more than 60 strategies from around the world that bring the strategy landscape to life.
• Aligning beliefs: This section provides an in-depth look at the third goal of family-school engagement: redefine the purpose of school for students . It provides a framework for understanding how family-school engagement can support system transformation and our insights from surveying close to 25,000 parents and more than 6,000 teachers about their education beliefs. We conducted these surveys together with our Family Engagement in Education Network (FEEN) across 10 countries and one global private school chain.
• Conversation Starter tools: This section continues the in-depth look at redefining the purpose of school for students by sharing our “Conversation Starter” tools. These tools will help anyone begin exploring how to help families and schools reach a shared understanding of what a good-quality education looks like.

Whom is this playbook for?

This playbook is for anyone interested in helping families and schools work better together to improve or transform how education is delivered or what goals it achieves. Given the power held by education system leaders and school heads, this playbook is particularly focused on supporting them in understanding the why, what, and how of working jointly with families to improve or transform schools (as further described in Box 2, “Who should use this playbook?”).

How was the playbook developed?

The playbook incorporates input from dozens of organizations and thousands of individuals around the world as well as extensive strategy analysis and research, as follows:

We hope this playbook is particularly useful for school system leaders, teacher organizations, civil society partners, and funders. We also hope the many parent organizations around the world, whose work we lift up and highlight, will find this playbook helpful to their ongoing work. The list below is certainly not exhaustive, and if you find yourself outside of one of these groups, we encourage you to read on.

Education decision makers

• Jurisdiction leaders and administrators. At the broader systems level, the playbook can be especially relevant for jurisdiction leaders and administrators at the district, state, and national levels, including jurisdiction-level governing boards, private sector school networks, and education leaders with oversight of key functions such as strategic planning, teacher training, and community engagement.
• School leaders and leadership teams. At the school level, the playbook is designed for school leaders, principals, and their executive leadership teams, including staff with responsibilities over community engagement and student success, as well as any related school-level governing boards.
• Leadership training programs. In addition, the playbook can also be useful for trainers of school leaders, such as universities. We hope the playbook can inspire content for curricula around family engagement and systems transformation.

Teacher leaders

• Teacher networks. Teacher unions, networks, and organizations will also find this playbook useful, especially in their work on strategy, policy, and advocacy. Although the playbook is not designed for individual teachers, much of its content addresses topics that teachers regularly discuss and that figure in their concerns.
• Teacher training programs. In addition, the playbook can also be useful for trainers of teachers, such as universities. We hope it can inspire content for curricula around family engagement and systems transformation.

School partners

• School partners. In addition to systems-level administrators and school-level leaders, the playbook is useful for the many partners of schools. This includes NGOs, including those that support delivery of education to children; private sector organizations, such as for-profit education companies; and funders, including bilateral and multilateral agencies and philanthropic foundations.
• Parent organizations. We also designed the playbook for parent organizations—groups of parents that have organized themselves to provide input into school and community-level issues, such as curricula, school infrastructure, and public safety. These groups are well placed to advocate for strong family-school relationships, and we hope the playbook will inspire learning from the other parent organizations featured in the Strategy Finder.

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Acknowledgments

This playbook was co-authored by Rebecca Winthrop, Adam Barton, Mahsa Ershadi, and Lauren Ziegler from the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings. Rebecca Winthrop is the primary investigator, and the other co-authors are listed alphabetically given their equal contribution to the work.

The examples in the Strategy Finder were co-authored by Rebecca Winthrop, Adam Barton, Rachel Clayton, Steve Hahn, Maxwell Lieblich, Sophie Partington, and Lauren Ziegler.

This playbook was developed over a two-year period, with input from a number of collaborators, whose help was invaluable.

First and foremost, CUE would like to acknowledge the numerous inputs from the members of its Family Engagement in Education Network (FEEN), a group of education decisionmakers representing public education jurisdictions, private school networks, and nonprofit, parent, and funder organizations from countries around the world. FEEN members have shown their commitment to building ever stronger family-school partnerships, even during what have been the most challenging school years in recent memory. Members took time out of their schedules to attend regular virtual meetings, help co-create the vision guiding the project (including selecting the name of the network), review and adapt survey drafts, and connect us to their communities so we could conduct surveys and focus groups with parents and teacher across their jurisdictions. They provided documentation of family engagement strategies within their organizations, made time for follow-up interviews with CUE, and provided thoughtful input into early drafts of the playbook. CUE is forever grateful for the commitment, comradery, and wisdom of the network members, whose contributions have helped ensure the playbook reflects the lived experiences from numerous contexts around the world. We are also deeply indebted to the thousands of parents and teachers who across each FEEN jurisdiction took the time away from their busy lives talk to us and answer our surveys.   FEEN has grown since its inception and currently represents 49 organizations from 12 countries and one global private school chain with schools in 29 countries. The members are:

Aliquippa School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Allegheny Intermediate Unit, Pennsylvania, U.S. Association of Independent Schools of South Australia Avonworth School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Brentwood Borough School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Buenos Aires Ministry of Education, Argentina Butler School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Cajon Valley Union School District, California, U.S. Chartiers Valley School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Doncaster Council, UK Duquesne School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Fort Cherry School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Ghana Education Service, Ghana Hampton Township School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Himachal Pradesh Department of Education, India Hopewell School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Inter-American Development Bank Itau Social Foundation, Brazil Keystone Oaks School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Khed Taluka District, Maharashtra, India Leadership for Equity, Maharashtra, India LeapEd Services, Malaysia Learning Creates Australia Lively Minds, Ghana Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township, Indiana, U.S. Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, India Ministry of Education, Colombia Nashik District, Maharashtra, India Networks of Inquiry and Indigenous Education, Canada New Brighton School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. New Castle School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Nord Anglia Education Northgate School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Parentkind, UK Pune Municipal Corporation, Maharashtra, India RedPaPaz, Colombia Right to Play, Ghana Samagra, Himachal Pradesh, India School District 8 Kootenay Lake, British Columbia, Canada School District 23 Central Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada School District 37 Delta, British Columbia, Canada School District 38 Richmond, British Columbia, Canada School District 39 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada School District 48 Sea to Sky, British Columbia, Canada South Fayette School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. The Grable Foundation, U.S. Transformative Educational Leadership Program, Canada Western Beaver School District, Pennsylvania, U.S. Western Cape Department of Education, South Africa Young 1ove, Botswana

We are also deeply grateful to our colleagues who reviewed our playbook offering incisive and important feedback, suggestions, and critiques. Our final draft is measurably improved thanks to all of them taking time, often during weekends and holidays, to provide us with their feedback. Thank you to:

John Bangs, Madhukar Banuri, Alex Beard, Eyal Bergman, Jean-Marc Bernard, Sanaya Bharucha, Margaret Caspe, Yu-Ling Cheng, Jane Gaskell, Crystal Green, Judy Halbert, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Linda Kaser, Linda Krynski, Karen Mapp, Brad Olsen, Carolina Piñeros, Tom Ralston, Keri Rodrigues, Urvashi Sahni, Eszter Salamon, Michael Serban, and Heather Weiss.

In addition to the FEEN and peer reviewers, CUE conducted consultations and interviews with a number of stakeholders who provided thorough and thoughtful input over the years into the development of the research, the playbook, and the examples featured in the Strategy Finder. We are especially grateful to:

Akwasi Addae-Boahene, Yaw Osei Adutwum, Carla Aerts, Kike Agunbiade, Carolyne Albert-Garvey, Manos Antoninis, Anna Arsenault, Orazio Attanasio, Patrick Awuah Jr., Chandrika Bahadur, Rukmini Banerji, Peter Barendse, Alex Beard, Amanda Beatty, Gregg Behr, Luis Benveniste, Sanaya Bharucha, Elisa Bonilla Rius, Francisco Cabrera-Hernández, Paul Carter, Jane Chadsey, Mahnaz Charania, Su-Hui Chen, Yu-Ling Cheng, Elizabeth Chu, Samantha Cohen, Larry Corio, Richard Culatta, Laura Ann Currie, Tim Daly, Emma Davidson, Susan Doherty, Shani Dowell, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Cindy Duenas, David Edwards, Annabelle Eliashiv, Joyce L. Epstein, Jelmer Evers, Beverley Ferguson, Larry Fondation, Kwarteng Frimpong, Nicole Baker Fulgham, Howard Gardner, Elizabeth Germana, Caireen Goddard, L. Michael Golden, Jim Gray, Crystal Green, Betheny Gross, Azeez Gupta, Kaya Henderson, Ed Hidalgo, Paul Hill, Michael B. Horn, Bibb Hubbard, Gowri Ishwaran, Maysa Jalbout, William Jeynes, Jonene Johnson, Riaz Kamlani, Utsav Kheria, Annie Kidder, Jim Knight, Wendy Kopp, Keith Krueger, Sonya Krutikova, Linda Krynski, Asep Kurniawan, Bobbi Kurshan, Robin Lake, Eric Lavin, Lasse Leponiemi, Keith Lewin, Sue Grant Lewis, Rose Luckin, Anthony Mackay, Namya Mahajan, Karen Mapp, Eileen McGivney, Hugh McLean, Bharat Mediratta, David Miyashiro, Alia An Nadhiva, Rakhi Nair, David Nitkin, Essie North, Hekia Parata, David Park, Shuvajit Payne, Chris Petrie, Marco Petruzzi, Vicki Phillips, Christopher Pommerening, Vikas Pota, Andy Puttock, Harry Quilter-Pinner, Bharath Ramaiah, Dominic Randolph, Niken Rarasati, Fernando Reimers, Shinta Revina, Karen Robertson, Richard Rowe, Jaime Saavedra, Suman Sachdeva, Siddhant Sachdeva, Urvashi Sahni, Eszter Salamon, Madalo Samati, Lucia Cristina Cortez de Barros Santos Santos, Dina Wintyas Saputri, Mimi Schaub, Andreas Schleicher, Jon Schnur, Marie Schwartz, Manju Shami, Nasrulla Shariff, Amit Kumar Sharma, Jim Shelton, Mark Sherringham, Manish Sisodia, Sandy Speicher, Michael Staton, Michael Stevenson, Samyukta Subramanian, Sudarno Sumarto, Vishal Sunil, Daniel Suryadarma, Fred Swaniker, Nicola Sykes, Eloise Tan, Sean Thibault, Jean Tower, Mike Town, Florischa Ayu Tresnatri, Jon Valant, Elyse Watkins, Heather Weiss, Karen Wespieser, Jeff Wetzler, Donna Williamson, Sharon Wolf, Michael Yogman, Kelly Young, and Gabriel Sánchez Zinny.

We are also grateful for the many individuals at CUE who helped make the playbook come to life in various ways, including: Eric Abalahin, Jeannine Ajello, Jessica Alongi, Nawal Atallah, Sara Coffey, Rachel Clayton, Porter Crumpton, Steve Hahn, Grace Harrington, Justine Hufford, Abigail Kaunda, Maxwell Lieblich, Shavanthi Mendis, Aki Nemoto, Sophie Partington, Katherine Portnoy, and Esther Rosen. In addition, we would like to acknowledge copy editing services from Mary Anderson, Jessica Federle, and Donna Polydoros and design services from Marian Licheri, Damian Licheri, Andreina Anzola, and Rogmy Armas.

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions. Its mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the public. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its author(s), and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars. Brookings gratefully acknowledges the support provided by the BHP Foundation, Grable Foundation, and the LEGO Foundation.

Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.

The playbook is a living document that we plan to add to over time. If you have questions about the material or would like to see additional topics or information, please let us know at [email protected] .

For more information, contact:

Katherine Portnoy

[email protected]

About the Authors

Rebecca winthrop, co-director – center for universal education.

Rebecca Winthrop is a senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.   

Adam Barton

Cambridge international scholar, faculty of education – university of cambridge; former senior research analyst – center for universal education.

Adam Barton was a senior research analyst at the Center for Universal Education at Brookings and is a Cambridge International Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.

Mahsa Ershadi

Former postdoctoral fellow – center for universal education.

Mahsa Ershadi was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Universal Education at Brookings.

Lauren Ziegler

Project director, leapfrogging in education – brookings institution.

Lauren Ziegler is a project director at the Center for Universal Education at Brookings.

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How to Write the “Community” and “Issue” Yale Essays

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Hale Jaeger in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info. 

What’s Covered

The “community” essay: choosing a community, structuring the “community” essay, the “issue” essay: choosing your issue, issues to avoid, structuring the “issue” essay.

In this article, we discuss strategies for writing Yale University ’s “Community” and “Issue” supplemental essays. Applicants using the Common App or Coalition Application to apply to Yale are required to choose one of these two prompts and respond to it in 400 words or fewer. The first prompt is the “Issue” essay prompt, which reads:

Yale carries out its mission “through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” Reflect on a time when you exchanged ideas about an important issue with someone holding an opposing view. How did the experience lead you either to change your opinion or to sharpen your reasons for holding onto it? (400 words)

The second prompt is the “Community” essay prompt:

Reflect on a time when you have worked to enhance a community to which you feel connected. Why have these efforts been meaningful to you? You may define community however you like. (400 words)

In this article, we discuss choosing topics for each of these essays and strategies to structure them.

The Yale “Community” essay prompt clearly states that you can define community however you wish, which means you can choose to write about any kind of community that you feel you are a member of. When considering potential communities, start by brainstorming any groups you are part of that have defined boundaries, such as your town, school, team, or religious organization.

There are also informal communities that you could choose from, such as your friend group, family, coworkers, or neighborhood. Even though these groups have less of a formal definition, they are still communities. What matters most is that the community that you choose is important to you, that you have contributed to it, and that you have learned something from it.

When structuring this essay, think about it in three sections. The first introduces the community, the second demonstrates your contributions to the community, and the third explains what the community has given and taught you. As you write, keep in mind that this essay is a two-way street; you want to show what you have given to your community and what it has given you.

Introduce the Community

The first step in writing this essay is to introduce the community. Explain who is part of the community and what the community is like. Highlight the community’s structure by demonstrating how you are part of it and how you interact with your peers, superiors, or inferiors within the group. It is also important to depict the community’s dynamic in this part of the essay. For example, is it fun, relaxed, and loving, or is it rigorous, challenging, and thought provoking? 

Show What You’ve Contributed

The next section of this essay should discuss your engagement with this community and what you’ve contributed to it. Consider what you’ve done, what initiatives you’ve brought to the community, and what your role is within it. You can also highlight anything that you had to give up to be part of the community.

Show What You’ve Learned

The last part of this essay should discuss what you have gained and learned from this community. For this portion, consider things that the community has given and taught you, as well as ways that it has helped you grow. Think about how this community has shaped who you are and who you are becoming.

The other prompt option is the “Issue” essay. The first step for this one is to define what your issue is. It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as it’s something that has enough nuance for you to talk about it in a complex and intelligent way.

Make sure it’s an issue of some relevance to you; otherwise, it will come across as dispassionate. As you write this essay, you should show that you are somebody who cares about an issue that they think is significant. 

Grand Issues

When selecting an issue, you can either choose a grand one or a local one. Grand issues are big, unsolved problems that are common in society, such as cancer, homelessness, or food insecurity. If you do choose a grand issue, remind yourself of its personal importance. While grand issues are full of nuance, they may lack personal meaning. Examples of personal connections to grand issues could be if you have encountered homelessness, lived with food insecurity, or have lost someone to cancer.

Local Issues

Another topic option is to write about an issue that is local. For example, maybe your high school has a teaching staff that doesn’t represent the diversity of the student body. While this is not a global issue, it’s something that strongly affects you and your community. 

Perhaps you live in a town that is directly suffering from the opioid crisis, or you have divorced parents and have started an activist group for children of divorced parents. Both of these examples of local issues also have personal importance. 

When choosing a topic to write about, avoid issues that you don’t have any connection to and that aren’t personally important. These are often problems that are too grand and can’t be made personal, such as world peace. 

Another category of issues to avoid is anything that doesn’t align with Yale’s values. Yale, like most universities in the United States, generally has a liberal lean. As such, it is likely not in your best interest to write a strong defense of socially conservative values. While there are values that you are free to hold and express—and Yale welcomes people of all backgrounds and ideologies—this essay is not necessarily the best place to express them.

You are most likely applying to Yale because it’s a place that you want to be and have something in common with. This essay is a great opportunity to emphasize the values that you share with the university rather than the things that divide you. Since a reader only has five to seven minutes to go over your entire application, you don’t want them to come away with the sense that you are somebody who won’t thrive at Yale.

Define the Issue and Highlight Past Experiences

When writing the “Issue” essay, start by identifying the issue and sharing how you came across it. Then, provide insight into why it is meaningful to you and your relationship with it.

Next, show the reader how you have already engaged with the problem by detailing your past with the issue. 

Discuss Future Plans to Approach the Issue

After this, you can look forward and discuss your future with this issue. A great strategy is to write about how your Yale education will address the problem and how your field of study relates to it. You can also highlight any Yale-specific programs or opportunities that will give you insight or context for tackling the issue. 

Alternatively, if there is something about this issue that Yale’s academic flexibility will enable you to explore, you can share that in this part of the essay. For example, maybe you are interested in health policy and plan to take classes in the sciences. You also want to take classes in the history of health, science, and medicine, as well as political science and economics courses, which you plan to utilize to write new healthcare policies.

Another option is to focus on an aspect of Yale’s community, such as peers, professors, or mentors who will help develop your ability to navigate the issue. Ultimately, you want to demonstrate in this essay that what (and how) you learn at Yale will prepare you to take action and move forward with confronting your issue in the future.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how to write a great community service essay.

College Admissions , Extracurriculars

Are you applying to a college or a scholarship that requires a community service essay? Do you know how to write an essay that will impress readers and clearly show the impact your work had on yourself and others?

Read on to learn step-by-step instructions for writing a great community service essay that will help you stand out and be memorable.

What Is a Community Service Essay? Why Do You Need One?

A community service essay is an essay that describes the volunteer work you did and the impact it had on you and your community. Community service essays can vary widely depending on specific requirements listed in the application, but, in general, they describe the work you did, why you found the work important, and how it benefited people around you.

Community service essays are typically needed for two reasons:

#1: To Apply to College

• Some colleges require students to write community service essays as part of their application or to be eligible for certain scholarships.
• You may also choose to highlight your community service work in your personal statement.

#2: To Apply for Scholarships

• Some scholarships are specifically awarded to students with exceptional community service experiences, and many use community service essays to help choose scholarship recipients.
• Green Mountain College offers one of the most famous of these scholarships. Their "Make a Difference Scholarship" offers full tuition, room, and board to students who have demonstrated a significant, positive impact through their community service

Getting Started With Your Essay

In the following sections, I'll go over each step of how to plan and write your essay. I'll also include sample excerpts for you to look through so you can get a better idea of what readers are looking for when they review your essay.

Step 1: Know the Essay Requirements

Before your start writing a single word, you should be familiar with the essay prompt. Each college or scholarship will have different requirements for their essay, so make sure you read these carefully and understand them.

Specific things to pay attention to include:

• Length requirement
• Application deadline
• The main purpose or focus of the essay
• If the essay should follow a specific structure

Below are three real community service essay prompts. Read through them and notice how much they vary in terms of length, detail, and what information the writer should include.

From the Equitable Excellence Scholarship:

"Describe your outstanding achievement in depth and provide the specific planning, training, goals, and steps taken to make the accomplishment successful. Include details about your role and highlight leadership you provided. Your essay must be a minimum of 350 words but not more than 600 words."

From the Laura W. Bush Traveling Scholarship:

"Essay (up to 500 words, double spaced) explaining your interest in being considered for the award and how your proposed project reflects or is related to both UNESCO's mandate and U.S. interests in promoting peace by sharing advances in education, science, culture, and communications."

From the LULAC National Scholarship Fund:

"Please type or print an essay of 300 words (maximum) on how your academic studies will contribute to your personal & professional goals. In addition, please discuss any community service or extracurricular activities you have been involved in that relate to your goals."

Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas

Even after you understand what the essay should be about, it can still be difficult to begin writing. Answer the following questions to help brainstorm essay ideas. You may be able to incorporate your answers into your essay.

• What community service activity that you've participated in has meant the most to you?
• What is your favorite memory from performing community service?
• Why did you decide to begin community service?
• What made you decide to volunteer where you did?
• How has your community service changed you?
• How has your community service helped others?
• How has your community service affected your plans for the future?

You don't need to answer all the questions, but if you find you have a lot of ideas for one of two of them, those may be things you want to include in your essay.

Writing Your Essay

How you structure your essay will depend on the requirements of the scholarship or school you are applying to. You may give an overview of all the work you did as a volunteer, or highlight a particularly memorable experience. You may focus on your personal growth or how your community benefited.

Regardless of the specific structure requested, follow the guidelines below to make sure your community service essay is memorable and clearly shows the impact of your work.

Samples of mediocre and excellent essays are included below to give you a better idea of how you should draft your own essay.

Step 1: Hook Your Reader In

You want the person reading your essay to be interested, so your first sentence should hook them in and entice them to read more. A good way to do this is to start in the middle of the action. Your first sentence could describe you helping build a house, releasing a rescued animal back to the wild, watching a student you tutored read a book on their own, or something else that quickly gets the reader interested. This will help set your essay apart and make it more memorable.

Compare these two opening sentences:

"I have volunteered at the Wishbone Pet Shelter for three years."

"The moment I saw the starving, mud-splattered puppy brought into the shelter with its tail between its legs, I knew I'd do whatever I could to save it."

The first sentence is a very general, bland statement. The majority of community service essays probably begin a lot like it, but it gives the reader little information and does nothing to draw them in. On the other hand, the second sentence begins immediately with action and helps persuade the reader to keep reading so they can learn what happened to the dog.

Step 2: Discuss the Work You Did

Once you've hooked your reader in with your first sentence, tell them about your community service experiences. State where you work, when you began working, how much time you've spent there, and what your main duties include. This will help the reader quickly put the rest of the essay in context and understand the basics of your community service work.

Not including basic details about your community service could leave your reader confused.

Step 3: Include Specific Details

It's the details of your community service that make your experience unique and memorable, so go into the specifics of what you did.

For example, don't just say you volunteered at a nursing home; talk about reading Mrs. Johnson her favorite book, watching Mr. Scott win at bingo, and seeing the residents play games with their grandchildren at the family day you organized. Try to include specific activities, moments, and people in your essay. Having details like these let the readers really understand what work you did and how it differs from other volunteer experiences.

Compare these two passages:

"For my volunteer work, I tutored children at a local elementary school. I helped them improve their math skills and become more confident students."

"As a volunteer at York Elementary School, I worked one-on-one with second and third graders who struggled with their math skills, particularly addition, subtraction, and fractions. As part of my work, I would create practice problems and quizzes and try to connect math to the students' interests. One of my favorite memories was when Sara, a student I had been working with for several weeks, told me that she enjoyed the math problems I had created about a girl buying and selling horses so much that she asked to help me create math problems for other students."

The first passage only gives basic information about the work done by the volunteer; there is very little detail included, and no evidence is given to support her claims. How did she help students improve their math skills? How did she know they were becoming more confident?

The second passage is much more detailed. It recounts a specific story and explains more fully what kind of work the volunteer did, as well as a specific instance of a student becoming more confident with her math skills. Providing more detail in your essay helps support your claims as well as make your essay more memorable and unique.

Step 4: Show Your Personality

It would be very hard to get a scholarship or place at a school if none of your readers felt like they knew much about you after finishing your essay, so make sure that your essay shows your personality. The way to do this is to state your personal strengths, then provide examples to support your claims. Take some time to think about which parts of your personality you would like your essay to highlight, then write about specific examples to show this.

• If you want to show that you're a motivated leader, describe a time when you organized an event or supervised other volunteers.
• If you want to show your teamwork skills, write about a time you helped a group of people work together better.
• If you want to show that you're a compassionate animal lover, write about taking care of neglected shelter animals and helping each of them find homes.

Step 5: State What You Accomplished

After you have described your community service and given specific examples of your work, you want to begin to wrap your essay up by stating your accomplishments. What was the impact of your community service? Did you build a house for a family to move into? Help students improve their reading skills? Clean up a local park? Make sure the impact of your work is clear; don't be worried about bragging here.

If you can include specific numbers, that will also strengthen your essay. Saying "I delivered meals to 24 home-bound senior citizens" is a stronger example than just saying "I delivered meals to lots of senior citizens."

Also be sure to explain why your work matters. Why is what you did important? Did it provide more parks for kids to play in? Help students get better grades? Give people medical care who would otherwise not have gotten it? This is an important part of your essay, so make sure to go into enough detail that your readers will know exactly what you accomplished and how it helped your community.

"My biggest accomplishment during my community service was helping to organize a family event at the retirement home. The children and grandchildren of many residents attended, and they all enjoyed playing games and watching movies together."

"The community service accomplishment that I'm most proud of is the work I did to help organize the First Annual Family Fun Day at the retirement home. My job was to design and organize fun activities that senior citizens and their younger relatives could enjoy. The event lasted eight hours and included ten different games, two performances, and a movie screening with popcorn. Almost 200 residents and family members attended throughout the day. This event was important because it provided an opportunity for senior citizens to connect with their family members in a way they aren't often able to. It also made the retirement home seem more fun and enjoyable to children, and we have seen an increase in the number of kids coming to visit their grandparents since the event."

The second passage is stronger for a variety of reasons. First, it goes into much more detail about the work the volunteer did. The first passage only states that she helped "organize a family event." That really doesn't tell readers much about her work or what her responsibilities were. The second passage is much clearer; her job was to "design and organize fun activities."

The second passage also explains the event in more depth. A family day can be many things; remember that your readers are likely not familiar with what you're talking about, so details help them get a clearer picture.

Lastly, the second passage makes the importance of the event clear: it helped residents connect with younger family members, and it helped retirement homes seem less intimidating to children, so now some residents see their grand kids more often.

Step 6: Discuss What You Learned

One of the final things to include in your essay should be the impact that your community service had on you. You can discuss skills you learned, such as carpentry, public speaking, animal care, or another skill.

You can also talk about how you changed personally. Are you more patient now? More understanding of others? Do you have a better idea of the type of career you want? Go into depth about this, but be honest. Don't say your community service changed your life if it didn't because trite statements won't impress readers.

In order to support your statements, provide more examples. If you say you're more patient now, how do you know this? Do you get less frustrated while playing with your younger siblings? Are you more willing to help group partners who are struggling with their part of the work? You've probably noticed by now that including specific examples and details is one of the best ways to create a strong and believable essay .

"As a result of my community service, I learned a lot about building houses and became a more mature person."

"As a result of my community service, I gained hands-on experience in construction. I learned how to read blueprints, use a hammer and nails, and begin constructing the foundation of a two-bedroom house. Working on the house could be challenging at times, but it taught me to appreciate the value of hard work and be more willing to pitch in when I see someone needs help. My dad has just started building a shed in our backyard, and I offered to help him with it because I know from my community service how much work it is. I also appreciate my own house more, and I know how lucky I am to have a roof over my head."

The second passage is more impressive and memorable because it describes the skills the writer learned in more detail and recounts a specific story that supports her claim that her community service changed her and made her more helpful.

Step 7: Finish Strong

Just as you started your essay in a way that would grab readers' attention, you want to finish your essay on a strong note as well. A good way to end your essay is to state again the impact your work had on you, your community, or both. Reiterate how you changed as a result of your community service, why you found the work important, or how it helped others.

Compare these two concluding statements:

"In conclusion, I learned a lot from my community service at my local museum, and I hope to keep volunteering and learning more about history."

"To conclude, volunteering at my city's American History Museum has been a great experience. By leading tours and participating in special events, I became better at public speaking and am now more comfortable starting conversations with people. In return, I was able to get more community members interested in history and our local museum. My interest in history has deepened, and I look forward to studying the subject in college and hopefully continuing my volunteer work at my university's own museum."

The second passage takes each point made in the first passage and expands upon it. In a few sentences, the second passage is able to clearly convey what work the volunteer did, how she changed, and how her volunteer work benefited her community.

The author of the second passage also ends her essay discussing her future and how she'd like to continue her community service, which is a good way to wrap things up because it shows your readers that you are committed to community service for the long-term.

What's Next?

Are you applying to a community service scholarship or thinking about it? We have a complete list of all the community service scholarships available to help get your search started!

Do you need a community service letter as well? We have a step-by-step guide that will tell you how to get a great reference letter from your community service supervisor.

Thinking about doing community service abroad? Before you sign up, read our guide on some of the hazards of international volunteer trips and how to know if it's the right choice for you.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

How to write a college supplement about community

You do not exist in a vacuum and colleges know this! The very common “community essay” is an opportunity for you to tell a story about one community that matters to you and what you have gained from its membership. This is your chance to talk about people you care about (and why!) in a much tighter and more focused way than you can in your Common App Personal Essay.   This is an important supplement because it shows you as you exist in connection to other people. Remember, college is an exercise in community – and schools want to admit students who understand our greater social responsibility toward the welfare of others.

Note: This essay will range in length but is often “mid-sized” and about 250 words.

Example Community Questions:

• The University of Michigan: Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it.
• Duke: We seek a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you'd like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you've had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying.  
• MIT: Describe the world you come from; for example, your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations?
• Tufts: How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing – your family, home, neighborhood, or community – shaped the person you are today?
• Yale: Reflect on a community to which you feel connected. Why is it meaningful to you?   You may define community however you like.
• Columbia: Columbia students take an active role in improving their community, whether in their residence hall, classes, or throughout New York City. Their actions, small or large, work to positively impact the lives of others. Share one contribution that you have made to your family, school, friend group, or another community that surrounds you.

LET'S BREAK DOWN THE ESSENTIAL POINTS YOU NEED TO HIT WHEN RESPONDING TO THIS SUPPLEMENT:

Be honest and authentic. Select and discuss a community that matters to you without being swayed by something you believe makes you “look good” in the eyes of an admissions officer. If you want to write about your soccer team, do that.

If the question asks you to reflect on how that community has “shaped” you, be sure to consider these lessons carefully and articulate them well here. Don’t bypass these essential parts of the question to focus only on defining your community.

Don’t think of yourself as a passive recipient of the benefits of community but rather consider communities where you are an active participant. If you are struggling to think about what community to discuss, consider communities where you have BOTH had an impact on others and been impacted by them.

It is sometimes better to dive into the unexpected! There are millions of essays about the sports team that came together after winning (or more often, losing) the big game. It’s fine to write about your team, but take it to another place! Find your own angle.

THINGS TO AVOID:

This is not a moment to traffic in stereotypes or judgments, either your own or those you might presume belong to others (including the admissions officer who reads your essay). When in doubt, ask a friend to read this essay and give you honest feedback on this metric!

More than many essays, it can be easy for a community essay to delve quickly into cliche and platitudes. Work hard to keep these phrases and concepts out of your essay. Keep it authentically in your voice.

It might be tempting to put yourself in a community whose boundaries you don’t know (example: “I belong to the community of makers/problem solvers/doers/etc…”), it is better to consider communities whose boundaries and members are clear and tangible. 

ADDITIONAL TIPS AND TRICKS:

As long as you are mindful of the word count, this is actually an essay that you can pretty easily reuse for multiple applications without any hesitation.

Do you have an activity on your Activities List that you felt you couldn’t adequately describe with the limited activity character count but that is really meaningful for you? Take this opportunity to tell the admissions committee more about this activity and use it as the highlight for your community.

Do you go to a unique high school? This is a wonderful opportunity to tell an admissions committee more about your school and what makes it such a special place. Don’t be afraid to brag a bit about your school and what you love about it.

When in doubt, consider writing about the communities that further the narrative your application is building and write about these. Are you telling a story about yourself as an aspiring cancer-researcher? Then use a community in your science lab to further illustrate this point. Don’t just pull something fully random out of a hat here!

Elise holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Williams College and an MEd in Administration & Social Policy from Harvard. She has spent the past twenty years working in top-tier independent schools.

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More than 100 students enter essay contest, winners give cash to charity

A pr. 18—The Downriver West Kiwanis Club held its annual Elementary School Essay Contest recently at the Brownstown Community Center.

This contest marked the fourth year that the club has offered the two-school district project. Invitations to elementary schools in various communities were sent out requesting participation.

The fourth-grade teachers at Barnes Elementary School in Flat Rock, Miller Elementary School in New Boston, and Brown Elementary School in Huron Township answered the bell.

Students accepted the opportunity to write a 150-word essay or less answering the following question: "If you had $100 to donate to a worthy cause, who would you donate it to, and why?"

It turned out to be a question more than 100 students were willing to answer.

A panel of club members reviewed all entries before the deadline and after careful consideration, chose first- and second-place winners from each school.

The winners and their parents, along with teachers, principals and staff from each school, were invited to attend a dinner to receive their recognition.

Also in attendance were representatives from each charity that the students chose to write about in their respective essays. Each student then read their essay out loud that evening.

The first-place winners received a $100 check from the club to present to their charity of choice at the event.

The winners also received a lawn sign to proudly display in their yard, a certificate of congratulations and a gift basket.

Students from all three schools received a certificate of participation from the club.

The winners from each school are:

First place: Charles Wright — Toys for Tots

Second place: Caroline Ingram — St. Jude's Children's Hospital

First place: Connor Novak — Kiwanis of Michigan Foundation

Second place: Axton Sortwell — St. Jude's Children's Hospital

First place: Grace Luker — St. Jude's Children's Hospital

Second place: Henry Kridner — Toys for Tots

Every month, the club works on a different service project to assist the communities they serve.

The club welcomes anyone who would like to participate.

Information on scheduled meetings, upcoming service projects and community events can be found on the club's social media page at Facebook.com/downriverwestkiwanis .

Downriver West Kiwanis is an organization of volunteers dedicated to improving the lives of children in and around the communities they serve.

(c)2024 The News Herald, Southgate, Mich. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

25 Years Of Healing: How Six Columbine Survivors Found Life After Trauma

From EMDR therapy to “sad-mom playlists,” these women have found a path through the darkness.

It was nearing the end of spring term. The seniors had just gone to prom. Students were busy preparing for final exams and the long summer break. They walked through the halls of their beloved school, absorbed in all the usual joys and concerns that come with the ending of the school year. Then, suddenly, their lives changed forever.

Twenty-five years ago, on April 20, 1999, two gunmen shot and killed 12 students and a teacher at a high school in Littleton, Colorado. Twenty-four other students were physically injured during the attack at Columbine High School, but the invisible wounds inflicted on the entire school community—and their families—defy measurement.

Essays From The Survivors:

But the effects did not extend only to those on the scene. The number of people affected by a mass shooting is “astronomical,” says Jillian Peterson, PhD, a forensic psychologist and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit gun-violence research center. In communities where a shooting took place, “you see higher levels of PTSD or acute stress reactions in people who weren't on the scene—who just identify with that community,” she says. “It’s shocking, the number of people impacted. And in many ways, we’re all impacted. When you have events like Columbine, they hit us on a national level.”

Trauma doesn’t remain within geographical boundaries either—it can trace along identity-group lines that extend far beyond the incident’s location, says Abigail Hurst, director of Trauma-Informed Programs at Everytown for Gun Safety . For example: The 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando had ripple effects across the broader LGBTQ community, and the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019 had a similar impact on Latinx people, she says.

Additionally, mass shootings like Columbine end up getting replayed in the 24-hour news cycle, which seems to have a different traumatic effect, though more research into that is needed. “Columbine had such a profound impact. It hit right when 24/7 cable news was taking off, so the coverage was just constant,” Peterson says.

Survivors’ mental and emotional responses in the wake of gun violence vary significantly from person to person. But in the immediate aftermath, one in three survivors lives in fear and feels unsafe, a 2023 research report from Everytown for Gun Safety found. They also experience things like hypervigilance, numbness, paranoia, anxiety , and depression , says Hurst. Sometimes, those responses can last for decades. “It is very hard for people to truly understand the depth and the breadth of how trauma from gun violence can change [a person],” Hurst says.

Two and a half decades have passed since that spring morning in Colorado, but many people are still battling the aftereffects. Therapy, advocacy, loved ones, support groups, and sometimes medication have all helped with healing. As survivor after survivor told Women’s Health , the pain never goes away, but you adapt. You learn to live a full, joyful life with that pain.

It’s important to note that therapy and trauma counseling looked a lot different in the late nineties and early aughts as well. There was more stigma, fewer resources for survivors. So, for the six women here, the years immediately following the shooting were focused mostly on putting one foot in front of the other, trying to convince themselves, “I’m fine. I’m okay.” Healing—which is a continuous journey, they all say—came later. (Two of the women sought out mental health treatment only after becoming parents.)

“We’ve gotten, in some ways, much more comfortable in the last 25 years talking about mental health, talking about trauma, reducing the stigma around it,” says Peterson. “There’s a lot more awareness. A lot more language about it.”

Each woman here has dedicated her life to service to others—whether through helping young people, supporting other survivors, caring for children with special needs, or advocating for change at a national level. A few became teachers. One became a therapist. All have committed to sharing their stories, whether through public speeches or interviews, in hopes that they can educate people and be a resource to those who might be struggling. Every single one of them says that turning their pain into power—through advocacy work, public speaking, and connecting with survivors—has been one of the strongest therapies they’ve found for their trauma.

“Sometimes, survivors can also be the ones who can push us forward,” Peterson says.

Amy Over was a senior at Columbine when she hid under a cafeteria table and was able to safely evacuate with other students thanks to her basketball and track coach, Dave Sanders. She now works as a paraeducator for children with special needs and founded Survivor’s Path, which brings speeches about trauma recovery and mental health to audiences across the country. Her own kids are graduating from high school this year and will be heading to their senior prom this spring.

At 43, I feel like I’ve really come into my own. I was telling my husband recently that I feel really happy in my life right now. I feel strong, physically, and I’m taking care of my mental health. I feel at peace and grounded. I also feel like I found a new purpose, working with special needs kiddos as a paraeducator. It’s a physically demanding job, but I enjoy it, and it’s good for me to always be moving.

Last week I did my first lockdown drill at school. That was very, very triggering for me. My boss was with me, and she was holding my hand, telling me, “Everything is going to be okay—you’ve got this.” But I came home and I was emotionally and physically exhausted.

The shooting was a few days after my senior prom, so there’s the “pre- Amy” and the “after Columbine Amy.” I was in the cafeteria under a table. My basketball and track coach essentially saved my life—and thousands of other lives—because he told us when to run for the doors.

In the immediate aftermath, it was just so overwhelming. I didn’t know what to do. That June, my mom scheduled a couple of therapy sessions, because we got a few for free. I lost my ever-loving mind with one of the counselors. She had started asking me really triggering questions about the shooting, and I wasn’t in a place to answer them. I became so enraged that I snapped—and ended up throwing a vase at her. I had so much anger. And from there, I kind of just coped with alcohol and partying.

PTSD creeps and seeps in years later. Mine appeared when I became a parent. I met my husband at 19. We got married at 21, and I had my daughter, Brie, at 24. I was a young mom trying to send my daughter to preschool and I was just like, “how is she going to be safe?” It wasn’t about me anymore—it was about keeping my kids safe, and mass shootings just kept happening. I remember when Sandy Hook happened, my son was a baby and my daughter was in first grade. I was on a trip with my husband in New York City. We were in Times Square, and I fell to my knees when I saw on the big screen what had happened. I called my nanny: “Where’s Brie? Where’s Masen?” I just panicked.

I started feeling like I was having a heart attack every day, and I began having night terrors. I wasn’t sleeping. I was just in a really bad cycle. And it wasn’t until then that I decided, “hey, I need help. I’m drowning.”

.css-1cugboc{margin:0rem;font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.2;font-family:Domaine,Domaine-roboto,Domaine-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;color:#f7623b;font-weight:bold;}.css-1cugboc em,.css-1cugboc i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1cugboc b,.css-1cugboc strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;} “I have tools in my toolbox that help me. I still do check-ins with a new therapist once a month. I make sure I sleep enough and drink enough water—that I’m taking care of my basic needs.”

My husband helped me get on medication and found this amazing therapist—a Columbine teacher and counselor from back in the day. He knew my coach and all my peers. He was also on the forefront of EMDR therapy [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which is supposed to help reprocess traumatic memories ]. I’m proud to say that I haven’t had a panic attack in years.

These days, I have tools in my toolbox that help me. I still do check-ins with a new therapist once a month. I make sure I sleep enough and drink enough water—that I’m taking care of my basic needs. And I also exercise every day—it’s just part of my mental health [routine]. I kickbox, I run, I do races and challenges and goat yoga. I hike and fish. I walk around my neighborhood. I still box and train with a pro boxer. It empowers me. That anger is still there, and this is a safe way for me to take out my sadness and anxiety. It’s just fun and keeps my mind active.

My kids are graduating from high school this spring, and I’m just beyond proud of them. I’m really looking forward to celebrating. But [this time] has also been challenging: My kids will be going to their senior prom soon, and that was the last time I was “normal Amy”—at my senior prom 25 years ago. It was such a magical time in my life. And Columbine was such an amazing school. So that’s going to be tough. The shooting is something that I’m not over—I’m over coming . I’m still getting through this.

I tell my story not to make people sad, but to give them hope. I talk about Columbine because I want to talk about how I got through the nitty-gritty parts, and how I’m going to continue to take care of myself and others around me.

Heather Martin Egeland

Heather turned 18 two days after the mass shooting at Columbine. After the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, Heather and another Columbine survivor, Jennifer Hammer, cofounded The Rebels Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization named for the Columbine High School mascot, which helps survivors of mass shootings connect and find services. Heather is still the executive director and also a high school English teacher and the yearbook advisor.

The year mark—and the days leading up to it—are always weird. They’re always funky and difficult in different, sometimes unexpected, ways. And major moments in my healing journey—which has centered on peer support, advocacy, and starting trauma therapy—are also very closely tied to the big round-number year marks.

Ten years after the shooting at Columbine, I realized I wanted to become a teacher. That’s where I belonged. That was the space for me. And I don’t know if I would have become the teacher I am today if not for the events of April 20, 1999. I think I’m a better teacher because of my recovery journey.

I struggled so badly in college that I just eventually failed out. I started working in the restaurant business, but at the 10-year mark, I reconnected with all my classmates, and I decided to step down from my restaurant management role and go back to school. I finished my bachelor’s degree and got my teaching license.

While filming a documentary, [the crew] wanted to film some B-roll and asked if I would flip through my old yearbook. I hadn’t looked at it in years, and as I was flipping through, I saw that my high school English teacher had written, “I hope you major in English and become a teacher. Your students would love you.” I had apparently told my English teacher that I wanted to be a teacher, but I had totally forgotten because, well, trauma. We had graduated about a month after the shooting and, as seniors, never went back to that school.

It also took me 10 years to recognize and own the title of “survivor.” I was physically uninjured, and I wasn’t in the library. I really minimized my trauma and my experience. I was always making excuses to myself about why I shouldn’t be traumatized—because so many others had it worse, had experienced and seen worse. I felt like my trauma was not bad enough to warrant what I was feeling inside and the nightmares I was having. But at the 10-year mark, I was invited back to the school and finally got together with the Class of 1999, and I found out that I wasn’t alone in my struggles. What I was feeling was totally normal, and that peer support was a game changer for me.

I’d tried therapy one year after the shooting. Looking back, I’m really proud of my sweet little 19-year-old self, because I knew something wasn’t right. Fascinatingly, though, I didn’t think it was because of the shooting. “It’s been a whole year,” I’d tell myself—and that’s horrifying that I thought that and was putting that kind of pressure on myself. I thought it was because I was in college, dealing with whatever college kids dealt with. But I was dropping out of classes, and I knew something was wrong.

Thirteen years after the shooting, we started The Rebels Project. Another classmate and survivor, Jennifer Hammer, texted me a day after the Aurora theater shooting in 2012: “What do you think about starting a support group for survivors of mass shootings?” And I told her, “I’m in.” Two days later, we had an online platform up and running. We were desperate to help because when these events happen, it really amplifies the helplessness that I felt the day of the shooting. It’s very triggering and brings about really big emotions. This was a way that we could help, that we could give back.

Now, people find out about The Rebels Project through word of mouth—we’ve been around a long time, we’re established, and we’re trusted. And if Columbine is any indicator, we know our services are, unfortunately, going to be needed at least 25 years down the road.

“It’s important that other survivors know that trauma is not a competition. It’s not about who suffered more and who struggled more and who experienced more.”

At the 20-year mark, I finally started trauma therapy—like actual trauma therapy, where I did EMDR and brainspotting [therapy using spots in a person’s visual field to help them process trauma]. I had been on a planning committee for the 20-year mark and was connecting for the first time with victims’ families—and I found that I was not okay. So, I went to trauma therapy pretty extensively for about a year and a half, and now I go back a couple times a year—typically in March and April, when the year mark is approaching.

I think this year mark is going to be difficult. I say that out loud right now, knowing that next week, I’ll have a meltdown about something and I won’t know why until my husband says, “It’s April.” And I’ll say, “Oh, yeah.” I can still sometimes feel angry when I’m triggered, similar to my feelings in the months after the shooting. But now I recognize it for what it is and have learned that I don’t need to—nor should I—watch coverage of new [shooting] events. My bounce-back time is much shorter.

I would go back in half a heartbeat and change the events of that day if I could. I am also extremely proud of the person I am today, and that probably is because of how I reacted and grew in the aftermath. It took—and is still taking—time, but 25 years out, I’m just so much better and have overcome a lot.

It’s important that other survivors know that trauma is not a competition. It’s not about who suffered more and who struggled more and who experienced more. Your experience and your story are valid and real. Your trauma matters, and your experience matters, and you matter. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to still be impacted. I am of course still impacted 25 years later, but it definitely gets better.

Missy Mendo

Fourteen-year-old Missy Mendo was in math class at Columbine when she heard the shooting start. She and her classmates evacuated to a park across the street where the perpetrators began shooting at them. After immediately relocating to the East Coast after high school, Missy eventually headed back to Colorado. These days, Missy works for the state of Colorado in the department of regulatory agencies and is director of community outreach for The Rebels Project.

I heard this saying once: “You never know that your experience could become somebody else’s playbook.” And these days, the ability to help someone else who may be going through something similar to what I’ve gone through—especially another mom—makes me feel strong and empowered. Talking to other survivors has helped me significantly. I say this all the time: A hug from another survivor is totally different than a hug from somebody trying to console you. It’s an unwritten understanding. They get it.

When The Rebels Project first started after the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, I couldn’t get involved because I was living on the East Coast. But I ended up moving back to Colorado, and I showed up to a silent auction the group was holding. By the end of the night, I had accepted a job as their assistant director of fundraising. It was at that point that I started to really get to know other communities of survivors—helping them connect. Now, I’ve been director of community outreach for almost six years.

Twenty-five years ago, mental health wasn’t exactly a thing. The county offered us six free therapy sessions [after the shooting], but it’s not like you could pick and choose therapists. I got a marriage and family therapist who was much older, and she and I didn’t jive very well. We weren’t a good match. At the end, I just thought, Okay, I did my six weeks, I’m okay , and then spent the next 20 years with no therapy whatsoever. No support groups, no therapy, nothing—just figuring it out on my own.

“Twenty-five years ago, mental health wasn’t exactly a thing.”

After the shooting, my sleep pattern immediately changed—I wasn’t sleeping. My brain wouldn’t shut off. I got in the habit of sleeping with the television on because it helped with the silence in my head. The news outlets kept repeating everything [about the shooting], so I started watching ESPN. I ran cross country and played soccer, and sports was the one thing that didn’t talk about what was going on in my life.

One of the hardest things to understand is that I have an unseen injury. When I read The Body Keeps the Score [by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD], I had to put the book down because it showed scans of what your brain looks like with anxiety, during a panic attack, and when you’re distressed. For the first time, I could physically see my injury—it was nonexistent until that point. The processing that took place in the days after, before I could continue to read the book, was just hard. I am getting goosebumps talking about it now.

When I started working for The Rebels Project, I put so much pressure on myself to say the right things to these communities, to do the right thing and make the right suggestions. I was afraid any mistake would set them back emotionally or retraumatize them. And I realized: If I’m seeing the same things in myself that these other people are going through, and they’re in therapy… I don’t want to project this onto my child; I want to set her up for success in this world as much as I possibly can. And I’ve been in therapy now for over four years.

The toughest connections I make are with other parents who say, “My kid just went through this. They have to go back to school, but we’re having a really hard time. I don’t know what to do.” It’s the hardest [question] to answer because how do I tell a mom that I’m 25 years out and I’m still struggling? How do you tell them there’s no quick fix to this? You can’t tell them that there’s going to be severe challenges their entire life, and you can’t tell them that everything is going to be okay. In the 25 years that I’ve been a survivor, I have never met another survivor that was like, “Yep, I’m good. No problems.”

The trajectory of my life completely changed that day at Columbine. But over the years, I’ve come to realize that I have the capability of letting somebody else know that they’re not alone in the world, and make them feel like they have a support system. I’ve noticed a change in myself: I’ve come to realize that even though you are a tiny speck on this planet, you can still make a difference.

Michelle Wheeler

Michelle Wheeler was a senior at Columbine when the shooting occurred. She was in the choir room and hid in the auditorium until she could evacuate the school. Ninety-six bullets passed her body as she fled the building. She worked for nearly two decades as a preschool teacher before becoming an instructional coach at district schools, helping preschoolers through trauma and crisis. After spending time at The Rebels Project, she now works with Survivor’s Path, speaking to audiences about trauma recovery and mental health. She is still married to her college sweetheart, who unknowingly saved her life when he asked her out on a first date.

When I work with parents of survivors, I try to have them understand that their kids are not going to be the same as they were the day before. That child is dead, I tell them, and you need to grieve the loss of the child you once had and learn to love and understand the child you have now. Because we do change. And we are angry. And we’re going to take it out on the people that we love the most, because they’re the safest. That child is going to be different in school. If they’re an athlete, they’re going to be different at their sport. They’re just going to be different. Their brain has changed, and there’s really no going back to the person they were. But there’s also so much joy and triumph in the person they will become. It takes time, and it’s a very rocky road, but you will get there.

In high school, I was the class clown. School was hard for me. I don’t know if I would have had the same life if I hadn’t gone through what I did. I think I would have been a teacher, but I don’t know that I’d have worked with the population [of kids] that I work with now. I grieved the person [I was on] April 19, 1999, many, many years ago, and have let go of who she could have been. I worked on understanding who I was after April 20, 1999—loving the awkwardness and the dark humor and the sadness and the celebrations. It took many, many years to accept who I am.

I was upstairs in the choir room when the shooting began, and hid in the auditorium for what seemed like forever—but I think it was only a couple minutes. When I exited the school, about 96 bullets passed my body. None hit me, thank God. I made it out of the school probably 10 or 15 minutes after everything started.

I was a senior at the time, and I went straight to college the next year. Now that I look back on it, I can see [my] patterns of destruction. I was drinking alcohol. I had a lot of anger issues. I liked the thrill of trying to get away with things and made poor decisions that could have put me in danger, because I felt this invincibility—like, this [mass shooting] happened, I can survive anything. But when we had our first fire drill in college, I hit the ground. I panicked. And I remember thinking, This is really weird. There’s something wrong with my heart .

It wasn’t until my third year [of college] that I hit rock bottom. I was—unconsciously, but consciously—saving medication to kill myself. I just didn’t have any feeling in my body; I felt numb. Nothing excited me. I thought, Well, if this is life, this isn’t worth living . I had a plan. But the night I chose to do it, my now husband asked me out on our first date, and I finally felt something different. (We kept going out on dates, and have now been married for 20 years.)

That was my turning point. That was my realization that I wasn’t well and that I needed help. So, I went to therapy, and have done extensive therapy since then, including four rounds of EMDR, which has helped me process the sounds and the smells and the tastes I experienced in my flashbacks. I was lucky to find my husband when I was fresh in my trauma because it meant I didn’t have to explain that I was a Columbine survivor, and that I don’t like loud sounds or blue lights. That I hate balloons and black trench coats.

“I needed people who love me and support me, who may not have been through what I’ve gone through, but who can sit with me on dark nights.”

But I wish I’d had family connection and support after the shooting [to help process the trauma]. I’m the baby of seven kids, and there’s a 16-year difference between me and the next oldest. And I just didn’t have that family support. I didn’t have anybody to go to the funerals with me. I didn’t have anybody I could process my trauma with. After the shooting, I went to my boyfriend’s parent’s house, then to my sister’s. And when I got to her house, my mom met me at the door with a bottle of Jack and said, “We’re never going to talk about this. If you talk about it, you’re letting the perpetrators win.” Obviously, that is horrible advice. I love my mother to death, she’s a wonderful mother, but I don’t know that she could mentally handle what I went through. I honestly think it’s a generational thing.

It wasn’t until I met my husband, and experienced that love and bond, that I realized I needed people in my corner. I needed people who love me and support me, who may not have been through what I’ve gone through, but who can sit with me on dark nights and help me through a nightmare, or walk my path with me on the day that marks the shooting every year. Someone who can understand my triggers and know when to say, “Oh, we gotta go.” I have now surrounded myself with a survivor community and created my own family that I can call when I’m in crisis. Without them, I don’t know where I’d be. I don’t even know if I’d be here.

Suicide is a scary topic, but it’s important to talk about. We lost many friends to suicide after Columbine. And now that I have come out and talked more about it these past few years, I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after panel discussions, saying, “Oh my gosh, I have felt the same way.” So, I know by talking about the hard stuff, it’s going to make a difference.

[Trauma recovery] is not an easy road. But it’s not always hard. You will find love. You will have children. (That will have its own difficulties!) But you will figure out how to manage life with your trauma. It never goes away, but you learn to live with it. You learn that some days, you can do hard things, and some days you can’t. And that’s okay.

Coni Sanders

Coni Sanders was 24 when her father, beloved Columbine teacher and coach Dave Sanders, was shot and killed while trying to lead students to safety from the school’s cafeteria. Today, she honors her father and his memory through her life’s work, helping people convicted of violent crimes “find peace and live nonviolent lives.” She still lives in Littleton, Colorado, and is expecting another grandchild this year.

I’m a forensic therapist. For almost 20 years, I’ve worked with people who have committed violent crime or related harm in their communities. Working with them is such an honor. It feels really empowering when I see so many successes—see people doing the work to change their path and live nonviolent lives. Over the years, it feels less connected to Columbine and more like, “this is where I’m meant to be.” Most of my clients don’t know my story—it’s not something I openly share because I don’t want to take the focus off of them. And while I’m pretty Google-able, [my history] is kind of my secret superpower. This is where I carry on my father’s legacy by helping the struggling to find a path.

When my dad, teacher and coach Dave Sanders, was killed at Columbine High School, I was 24 years old, working at the local phone company. I was rebellious at the time and hadn’t gone to college (even though my dad wanted me to) and feeling a bit lost in my life overall. After the shooting, it felt like I was in a dream—there’s a fog and a haze [over my memories]. It was unreal. I remember the details, but I don’t remember feeling anything.

At the time, I worked in the Denver Post building, and reporters would just stop by my workplace to talk about the shooting. I had to change jobs because I just wanted to hide, to have some semblance of normalcy. I was convinced I was fine and didn’t need therapy. Everyone kept telling me “be strong,” so I was trying to do that. I tried to be tough. I wish I understood that I didn’t have to be strong; it’s not realistic that someone could “be strong” in that situation without significant support from others.

Three years later, I was driving down the highway and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—the version sung by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwoʻole—came on, and I went back into that numb state. I pulled over, got out of my car, and went and sat in a ditch. And I just cried and cried and cried. When I got back in my car, I started driving really fast. And I realized I needed help.

When you’re a secondary or tertiary victim, it can feel like you don’t belong with other survivors. But these traumatic events are a wound for the entire community. That wound is seeing the people you care about suffer, the media coverage, the terror.

“When you’re a secondary or tertiary victim, it can feel like you don’t belong with other survivors. But these traumatic events are a wound for the entire community.”

Three years ago, we were cleaning out my mom’s basement and found the box of evidence. It had everything—his body bag, his bloody clothes—and we all just froze. We thought mom had the police department destroy everything. It was so horrifying, and the wounds just burst open. I went and found a therapist. “I can’t manage this,” I told them.

Twenty-five years doesn’t stop the hurt. It never stops. Even right now, my whole body will go numb, my breathing changes, and I have to remind myself that I’m okay. I do grounding techniques and try to stay in the present. I sometimes hold ice cubes to help bring me back into my body. When you suffer a trauma this deep, it’s always going to be there. I’ve been in this fight longer than most people who are surviving gun violence, but it’s a less lonely journey now because so many people have traveled this never-ending path. [After a mass shooting], you step onto this path not knowing where it’s going to go. I can tell you that you’re going to fall, you’re going to get bruised. You’re going to feel lost and numb and frustrated. But you’ll also find people along that path who have experienced the same thing, who care, who are advocating for change. There’s a wide network of supporters you can really lean on.

My daughter is about to have a baby, and my dad’s not here. He was such a wonderful grandpa, and some of my grandkids aren’t going to get to experience that. I remember when I turned the same age he was when he died, I kept thinking, Oh my gosh, he had so much more life to live . And I went numb again.

Someone left a pair of shoes at the memorial, and it says, “Coach, in these shoes, you gave me wisdom. In these shoes, you made me an athlete. In these shoes, you made me a champion. In these shoes, you made me a man. My love to you, Class of ’96.” People still come up to me to tell me my dad saved generations when he saved hundreds of kids in the cafeteria. “He saved my life, and now I have a baby,” one person told me. “And my baby will one day have a baby.”

Salli Garrigan

Salli Garrigan, 16, was in the choir room when the shooting at Columbine began. Now, she has two kids—a 9-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son—and finds her strength through telling her own story. Salli is now a volunteer with Moms Demand Action and a Senior Fellow with the Everytown Survivor Network.

I loved high school. I was a truly normal teenager—if you want to call a choir-theater kid normal, which I do! I was excited to be part of the pom squad.

In the immediate aftermath, I felt a kind of grief amnesia. I was in a haze, and everything just felt fuzzy. When I look back, everything just kind of goes white, like a weird dream. I don’t truly remember things that happened during that time. We went through the motions: going to funerals, going to the hospital.

Our rival high school opened its doors to us, we got handmade blankets from Project Linus, the first responders made potpourri from the flowers at the memorial—and that outpouring was therapeutic. The community came together; the world was with us. [Knowing] that helped a lot. We had a “taking back our school” rally the next year. It felt good to be back, even though our library was taped off—it was still a crime scene—and we’d have to walk by that every day. But getting one last year with everyone, to sit in familiar classrooms again, was so helpful. We were able to make new memories, which was really important. Bringing our choir back together—and singing again—was great, great therapy.

Back then, I didn’t consider myself a survivor. I wasn’t physically injured, so I always thought, Okay, I’m fine . I wasn’t fine, and looking back now, I get that I had PTSD. Even though I didn’t know what I needed at the time, I was lucky because I found outlets like theater and singing with friends—outlets, like dancing, that were healthy. Onstage, I could pretend I was something I wasn’t. I was able to tell someone else’s story and not my own. I could hide. It was a wonderful escape. I ended up getting a degree in musical theater and moved to New York, where I went on tours and did a lot of regional theater. I never sought out therapy, but looking back, I should have. In the ’90s, therapy seemed like you failed, which is so silly [to think] now, but at the time, there was this weird stigma.

“Back then, I didn’t consider myself a survivor. I wasn’t physically injured, so I always thought, Okay, I’m fine . I wasn’t fine, and looking back now, I get that I had PTSD.”

For a long time, I didn’t tell my story. But then the Parkland school shooting happened in 2018—it was eerily similar to what happened at the Columbine shooting—and that made me realize I needed to do something. I saw the kids calling themselves survivors, and I realized I could be a survivor. The Parkland kids weren’t trusting the adults [who were saying it would never happen again]. They were speaking out, and I had a moment of thinking, Why didn’t we speak out? At this point, my daughter had been born and I was pregnant with my son, and I was starting to realize my children are going to go to school, and they will see a whole different school day. I have a lot of guilt because lockdown drills happen because of our school. Because nothing changed after the Columbine shooting.

Around that time, I started getting involved in Moms Demand Action and the Everytown Survivor Network , and advocacy became an incredible coping mechanism. It was the first time I actually opened up, and it was very therapeutic to call myself a survivor, to share my story. I have [developed] other great coping mechanisms too: a sad-mom playlist that I listen to, or if I’m angry, I take a long walk so I don’t lash out at my family. It’s a lifelong grief—and you’ll be grieving in different ways, even 25 years later. You just don’t know how it will hit you. So, it’s okay to take a step back, feel all the feelings.

My daughter was with me when I was speaking out a lot about this [gun violence prevention] in D.C., so she has an idea of what happened. I tell her, “I'm working hard to keep the guns out of the hands of bad guys, so you can feel safe at school. You do the lockdown drills, you do all these things, and we’re working on it.” But I have moments where I give my kids extra-big hugs when I say goodbye to them. I want them to ask their own questions and feel what they want to feel. But it’s hard to ask, “How was your lockdown drill today?” I just wish it had stopped with us.

The six essays were condensed and edited for clarity, and were as told to Currie Engel.

Currie Engel is the news and features editor at Women's Health. She loves working on zeitgeisty news, culture, mental health, and reproductive rights stories. When she's not editing stories, she's writing them—one of her essays was recognized as a National Magazine Award finalist in 2023. Currie previously worked as an award-winning local reporter specializing in health investigations and features, and as a researcher at Time magazine.  

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Guest Essay

It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

As the postwar metropolis became a patchwork of local governments, each with its own tax base, the fiscal rationale for segregation intensified. Cities were fiscally incentivized to cater to the interests of white homeowners and provide better services for white neighborhoods, especially as middle-class white people began streaming into the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them.

One way to cater to wealthy and white homeowners’ interests is to intentionally conduct property assessments less often. The city of Boston did not conduct a citywide property reassessment between 1946 and 1977. Over that time, the values of properties in Black neighborhoods increased slowly when compared with the values in white neighborhoods or even fell, which led to property owners’ paying relatively more in taxes than their homes were worth. At the same time, owners of properties in white neighborhoods got an increasingly good tax deal as their neighborhoods increased in value.

As was the case in other American cities, Boston’s decision most likely derived from the fear that any updates would hasten the exodus of white homeowners and businesses to the suburbs. By the 1960s, assessments on residential properties in Boston’s poor neighborhoods were up to one and a half times as great as their actual values, while assessments in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were, on average, 40 percent of market value.

Jersey City, N.J., did not conduct a citywide real estate reassessment between 1988 and 2018 as part of a larger strategy for promoting high-end real estate development. During that time, real estate prices along the city’s waterfront soared but their owners’ tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods worth $175,000 received the same tax bill as a home in the city’s downtown worth $530,000.

These are hardly exceptions. Numerous studies conducted during those years found that assessments in predominantly Black neighborhoods of U.S. cities were grossly higher relative to value than those in white areas.

These problems persist. A recent report by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy found that property assessments were regressive (meaning lower-valued properties were assessed higher relative to value than higher-valued ones) in 97.7 percent of U.S. counties. Black-owned homes and properties in Black neighborhoods continue to be devalued on the open market, making this regressive tax, in effect, a racist tax.

The overtaxation of Black homes and neighborhoods is also a symptom of a much larger problem in America’s federated fiscal structure. By design, this system produces winners and losers: localities with ample resources to provide the goods and services that we as a nation have entrusted to local governments and others that struggle to keep the lights on, the streets paved, the schools open and drinking water safe . Worse yet, it compels any fiscally disadvantaged locality seeking to improve its fortunes to do so by showering businesses and corporations with tax breaks and subsidies while cutting services and shifting tax burdens onto the poor and disadvantaged. A local tax on local real estate places Black people and cities with large Black populations at a permanent disadvantage. More than that, it gives middle-class white people strong incentives to preserve their relative advantages, fueling the zero-sum politics that keep Americans divided, accelerates the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishes us all.

There are technical solutions. One, which requires local governments to adopt more accurate assessment models and regularly update assessment rolls, can help make property taxes fairer. But none of the proposed reforms being discussed can be applied nationally because local tax policies are the prerogative of the states and, often, local governments themselves. Given the variety and complexity of state and local property tax laws and procedures and how much local governments continue to rely on tax reductions and tax shifting to attract and retain certain people and businesses, we cannot expect them to fix these problems on their own.

The best way to make local property taxes fairer and more equitable is to make them less important. The federal government can do this by reinvesting in our cities, counties and school districts through a federal fiscal equity program, like those found in other advanced federated nations. Canada, Germany and Australia, among others, direct federal funds to lower units of government with lower capacities to raise revenue.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

Andrew W. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “ The Black Tax : 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

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Harvard announces return to required testing

Leading researchers cite strong evidence that testing expands opportunity

Students applying to Harvard College for fall 2025 admission will be required to submit standardized test scores, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced on Thursday. This new policy will be applied to the Class of 2029 admissions cycle and will be formally assessed at regular intervals.

For the Class of 2029 admissions cycle, Harvard will require submission of scores for the SAT or ACT. In exceptional cases in which applicants are unable to access SAT or ACT testing, other eligible tests will be accepted.

In a message to the FAS community on Thursday, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra foregrounded “a number of factors” that underscored the decision.

“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” she said. “Indeed, when students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application. In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range.”

In research published last year, Harvard Professors Raj Chetty and David J. Deming and co-author John N. Friedman used data from more than 400 institutions and about 3.5 million undergrads per year to better understand socioeconomic diversity and admissions. Standardized tests emerged as an important tool to identify promising students at less-well-resourced high schools, particularly when paired with other academic credentials.

“Critics correctly note that standardized tests are not an unbiased measure of students’ qualifications, as students from higher-income families often have greater access to test prep and other resources,” said Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics and director of Opportunity Insights . “But the data reveal that other measures — recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays — are even more prone to such biases. Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity.”

Deming, the Kennedy School’s Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy and a professor of education and economics at the Ed School, pointed to access as a key issue.

“The virtue of standardized tests is their universality,” he said. “Not everyone can hire an expensive college coach to help them craft a personal essay. But everyone has the chance to ace the SAT or the ACT. While some barriers do exist, the widespread availability of the test provides, in my view, the fairest admissions policy for disadvantaged applicants.”

In June 2020, as the pandemic severely limited access to standardized testing, Harvard began a test-optional policy under which students could apply to the College without submitting scores. The admissions cycle for the Class of 2028 was the fourth for which students were able to apply without submitting test scores. However, admissions has welcomed applicants to submit test scores, and the majority of those who matriculated during the past four years did so.

“Test scores can provide important information about a student’s application,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. “However, they representonly one factor among many as our admissions committee considers the whole person in making its decisions. Admissions officers understand that not all students attend well-resourced schools, and those who come from modest economic backgrounds or first-generation college families may have had fewer opportunities to prepare for standardized tests.”

In recent years, nonprofits such as Khan Academy have offered robust test-prep tools at no charge. In her message, Hoekstra said that access to testing should never prevent a student from applying to Harvard, and included information for those who may not be able to access the SAT or ACT, as well as tools such as Schoolhouse.world and other sources for no-cost tutoring and no-cost test preparation.

“We recognize that in parts of the United States there may be fewer students than in the past taking SAT or ACT for their state universities — and international applicants can also face barriers to testing,” said Joy St. John, director of admissions. “We hope that promising students faced with such challenges will still apply, using alternative forms of testing.”

Said Hoekstra: “Fundamentally, we know that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students, and to give Harvard the opportunity to support their development as thinkers and leaders who will contribute to shaping our world.”

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Orange High School junior earns second place in City Club’s Free Speech Essay Contest

• Updated: Apr. 19, 2024, 4:39 p.m. |
• Published: Apr. 19, 2024, 9:08 a.m.

Orange High School junior Lucy Campbell earned second place in the City Club of Cleveland’s 2024 Hope and Stanley Adelstein Free Speech Essay Contest (Photo Courtesy of Orange City Schools)

• Ed Wittenberg, special to cleveland.com

PEPPER PIKE, Ohio -- Orange High School junior Lucy Campbell earned second place and $750 in the 11th/12th-grade category of the City Club of Cleveland’s 2024 Hope and Stanley Adelstein Free Speech Essay Contest.

Winners were announced April 9.

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