Parent Engagement Institute: Leadership, Coaching & Community Organizing
Molly Carina Dengler is the Lead Professional Learning Facilitator at World Savvy, a Minneapolis nonprofit that partners with educators, leaders, and communities to transform teaching and learning so students develop the skills needed to navigate an increasingly complex world, and a former teacher.
We’re grateful to her for letting us re-post some thoughts she shared from sitting in at our summer Train The Trainers session. You can find original post here.
The Girasoles group of Coordinators, facilitated in Spanish by Ana Laura Narro
My first week of sabbatical has me thinking a lot about listening, leadership, and identity. I'm listening to Julia Cameron's (of The Artist's Way) The Listening Path while also starting morning pages, artist dates and walks, and I'm realizing how these practices integrate leadership, coaching and community organizing.
This week, I'm listening at the hybrid Parent Engagement Institute & Parent Mentor Program, learning from an incredible model I've admired for years after reading A Cord of Three Strands that puts relationships at the center of parent leadership. One-to-one conversations aren't simply a way to recruit parent mentors (now around 3,000 mentors in 300 schools!!).
They are a way to listen deeply enough to understand what parents care about, what they know, what they need, and what they are willing to organize around. The shared understanding that connected most with me was that capacity building is not just about training people to do a role.
It's about helping people discover and grow into a new understanding of themselves. Many parents enter schools carrying incredible strengths—as caregivers, problem-solvers, cultural navigators, advocates, interpreters, connectors, and community builders—without necessarily seeing those experiences as leadership. The Parent Mentor model creates space for parents to recognize and develop that leadership.
Parents who may not have seen themselves as educators begin to see that they are already teachers. Parents who may not have seen themselves as leaders begin to understand the power they hold. And leadership grows through practice.
I've had the opportunity to jump between groups facilitated in English and Spanish with very different facilitation styles. As facilitators make the content their own, I'm seeing facilitation as more than a technical skill but an empowerment strategy.
When parents learn to facilitate conversations, welcome different perspectives, ask powerful questions, give feedback publicly, take risks and help groups move toward shared action, they aren't just learning a skill. They are developing agency.
They are learning to shape spaces rather than simply participate in them. As a coach, educator, and community organizer, my original sabbatical question was around preparing educational leaders to co-create education systems and now I'm fired up thinking about what would become possible if schools and communities intentionally taught facilitation as a leadership practice for parents, students, and community members?
I don't intend on ever finding "THE answer" to my sabbatical question but the first few days have left me with:
- Listen deeply.
- Create spaces for people to discover their own leadership.
- Teach facilitation as a way of sharing power.
- And trust that people grow into leadership when we create the conditions for it.
My deepest gratitude to Palenque LSNA for inviting me to share the Parent Engagement Institute & Parent Mentor Program Train-the-Trainer experience, to Bridget Murphy and Iyabo Thompson Anifowoshe for the personal connections and to the coordinators in the Girasol and Dandelion groups for creating such courageous spaces for me to learn from.
