1. Understand how resources are currently allocated in your community
Districts and schools make important decisions about how to distribute their resources—including how to leverage teachers and other staff, organize learning experiences, and invest in student support services. These allocation decisions directly impact students’ success in school. That means the first step towards resource equity is understanding what resources your district has and how they’re being used. This can help illuminate your district’s strengths and highlight areas where your advocacy can help make improvements.
Ready to take this step?
Advocates can use the Resource Equity Diagnostic to better understand the context in their own district. This tool guides users through a set of key questions to understand current trends across ten dimensions, helping advocates generate conversation, interpret results, and begin to prioritize action.
Related Resource
The ARE sample meeting agenda offers a suggested structure for completing the Resource Equity diagnostic in partnership with other advocates or your district. The agenda outlines participants, activities, and prompts for discussion.
2. Talk to students, families, and educators about their experiences
Stories from your community are powerful and offer an important complement to hard numbers. This is because these perspectives add nuance and context to what the numbers and figures represent: While a statistic or chart may summarize a data trend, qualitative information can speak to the experiences behind the numbers. This additional context can illuminate the impact of resource disparities, highlight potential root causes of quantitative trends, and inform possible actions to address student needs. And when students, families, teachers, and administrators share their stories, it helps decision-makers register the impact of their decisions on individuals’ real experiences.
Related Resource
A data equity walk can bring community members together for a structured, facilitated conversation about data trends. It can also help the community reflect on personal experience and mobilize for action. EdTrust-West’s toolkit provides information, tips, and a facilitation guide for how to lead a data equity walk in your community.
3. Determine or refine your advocacy priorities
As advocates, we’re eager to demand change for our students, sometimes feeling like there are many things our school system can improve upon. But in order to be successful in these efforts, advocates first need to establish their priorities. Prioritization helps advocates use their own resources strategically, get specific about what they’re asking for, and communicate a compelling call to action. Having a short list of clear, specific priorities also makes it easier to build and maintain support for your cause within your community.
To help establish these priorities, advocates should consider:
- What are the underlying root causes of challenges in my school system?
- How do biases about this issue play out in my district? Explicit or implicit biases can underly root causes and/or affect peoples’ perceptions of root causes.
- Have the actions I’m considering for advocacy already been tried in my district?
- What recommendations do different stakeholder groups have—particularly those most directly impacted by existing inequities (including students, families, educators, and administrators)?
- What barriers exist that may undermine the feasibility or success of this action?
The ARE guidebooks offer a valuable resource to help advocates consider and prioritize possible changes to their districts’ resource allocation methods. The ten guidebooks—one for each Resource Equity dimension—prompt users to probe underlying causes of challenges in your school system, consider ways to improve students’ experiences in school, and plan next steps.
Related Resources
This Glossary of Advocacy Tactics by EdTrust-Tennessee and The Tennessee Alliance for Equity in Education identifies various advocacy tactics your organization can use when pushing for change.
This Community Mobilization Guide offers a case study in Dallas, TX, where the community led efforts to direct more high-quality resources to a restorative justice program. Prepared by Measure, this guide can be used as a template for advocates to outline their own problem statement, create a “community impact tree,” develop a “community asset map,” track stakeholder engagement, map solutions, and more.
4. Identify and leverage community leaders
Part of making your advocacy impactful is being able to partner with those that have the influence to advance your cause. This requires first understanding who these people are. To help you do so, advocates can “power-map” organizations, individuals, and coalitions in their community to understand who has “power” to influence a specific issue, identify potential champions, pinpoint key decisionmakers, and neutralize anticipated skepticism or concerns.
Unfortunately, resource allocation decisions—and the policies, practices, and levers that influence them—can be particularly complicated: Different entities at various levels of government each have unique responsibilities and types of authority.
ARE’s “Advocating Across Government” guides break down the roles and responsibilities of those at the federal, state, and local level so that advocates can direct efforts to those with decision-making power.
See the Advocating Across Government Tool
ⓘ Tip: When using the Advocating Across Government tool, start by identifying a question that begins with “Who has the authority to…?” Then, refer to the appropriate guide by determining which dimension of resource equity your question most directly aligns to. Check out the User’s Guide for specific examples.
Related Resource
Check out this Advocacy Hub – Powermapping resource for more information on how to map power in your community. This document, developed by EdTrust-Tennessee and the Tennessee Alliance for Equity in Education, provides users with background on power-mapping, considerations to gather relevant context, and a suggested template for the activity.
5. Make the case for change
Your message is important. And the more people who are compelled by it, the more they can help advance resource equity in your community. To share your perspective, start by considering what channels already exist for you to engage others. For example:
- Do you already frequent formal or informal community spaces with others that may want to become involved?
- Do you already manage a newsletter, social media account(s), or other communication tool that could highlight your cause?
- Do you already have strong relationships with key decision-makers who could help champion your advocacy efforts?
Simultaneously, think about ways to expand and strengthen your reach. Ask yourself:
- What new community spaces or networks could you join to connect with more supporters?
- Are there existing advocacy groups or coalitions aligned with your goals that you could collaborate with?
- Are there opportunities to engage local media to spotlight the issue and bring attention to inequities in your community?
No matter how you choose to amplify your call for change, crafting a compelling message is paramount: A strong, clear message helps you organize and share information in an impactful manner that motivates your audience to take action.
Use the ARE casemaking decks to better understand the essential elements of strong messaging, develop custom messaging for your advocacy priorities, and practice dismantling anticipated lines of opposition.
Related Resources
This Tennessee Alliance for Equity in Education webinar, “Telling Your Story: Effective Communication & Media Strategies,” features a presentation by strategic communications and advocacy agency RALLY on how to tell an effective story and a fireside chat with a Tennessee-based advocate sharing about her experiences during legislative sessions.
This webinar, “Communications for Fierce Advocacy: Developing and Leveraging Relationships with Reporters,” offers insight into how advocates can develop relationships with reporters, featuring a conversation with a local reporter.
Reach out for support!
For nearly three decades, EdTrust has worked alongside community organizers, grassroots organizations, and advocates to transform schools into places that serve all students well—especially those who are furthest from opportunity. As part of the Alliance for Resource Equity, EdTrust is eager to help advocacy groups achieve their goals and advance resource equity. Our team can help you analyze your community’s strengths and weaknesses, build support for resource equity among key audiences, and make the case for change to key decisionmakers.