New York State Education Department

Liberty Partnerships Program (RFP 2007)

The Liberty Partnerships Program (LPP) Parent Engagement and Leadership Initiative outlines the framework for building sustainable, parent-focused networks to support and build upon the Liberty Partnerships Program’s past and present efforts to engage and empower parents at 56 sites statewide.  LPP is a state-funded college preparatory program targeting at-risk rural, suburban, and urban youth. Our design is based upon best-of-breed practices to build each site’s capacity to overcome unique challenges associated with moving constituents along the parent engagement continuum toward positive, youth-benefiting outcomes.  College admission and graduation are the ultimate social capital building goals of this program. 

Our plans for LPP will build a network of practice by linking regional parent engagement and leadership communities of practice. The foundation upon which the communities of practice will rest will be the statewide network of LPP.  The objective of this strategy is to create a sustainable set of relationships, connections, and experiences that can serve as an infrastructure for growing knowledge, refining strategies, and troubleshooting emerging issues related to parent engagement and leadership within the network.

This approach focuses on building LPP's regional and local site capacity by creating communities of practice and linking them to a statewide network of practice. Our goal is to ensure that the capacity to promote and advance parent engagement and leadership grows in a sustainable way. The concepts upon which the design of the network of practice rest are those of longevity, interactivity, and innovation.

A network of practice is a mechanism in which individuals interact through social discourse in order to perform their work; asking for and sharing knowledge with each other. Networks of practice incorporate a range of structural forms from formal to informal forms and configurations.  Communities of practice, which are localized and are a component of networks of practice, typically consisting of strong ties linking individuals engaged in a shared practice who typically interact on a face-to-face basis. When communities of practice are organized under a network of practice rubric, opportunities to build a sustainable community infrastructure and internal capacity are enhanced.