1. Leading Off Campus
Parental Engagement
Taskforce
Elismary Valle, Rebecca Lemanski, Aaliyah Anderson, Devyn Kangas,
Dustin Munson, Hootan Kashi, Ingrid Ore, and Jaresse Mitchell

2. Goal
To help bring awareness to the importance of children staying in
school every day (reducing chronic absenteeism) by engaging
parents (Parental Engagement Taskforce)

3. Service Project
Rationale: Decades of research show that involving parents and families
in their child’s education is strongly linked to positive outcomes such as:
• Enthusiasm for school (school readiness)
• Higher reading and math scores
• Higher graduation rates
Family involvement is critical.

4. The Process
1. Discovering a way to aid community engagement
• We decided to target the high chronic absenteeism rates in Hartford
• We recognized that in order to get children in school, we should target the parents
2. Research
• We searched for organizations which aid parents
• We connected with numerous organizations asking them how we could help them and
ways we could get involved

5. 3. Discovery
• We feared organization would take too long to respond to us and we were in a major
time-crunch of 3 months
• We discovered that instead of asking organizations how we could help them, we had to
do something ourselves
• We wanted to find a way to get the children and parents together and learn about the
resources available to them
• We decided to have a dance with a resource fair incorporated into it
• We named it the “P/G & ME dance”

6. 4. Planning
• We began contacting agencies to attend our event and searching for stores to donate
food, gift cards, etc.
• We decided on having door prizes to encourage the guests to stay at the event until the
end
• We had to revise a donation letter, format generic emails to send to the agencies, create
advertisement, develop relationships with agencies, decide where our advertisement
would go, decide on the organization of our event, and so much more
• We confirmed seven agencies to attend our event, with the help of one of our fearless
leaders, Andre Santiago

7. 5. Execution
• We held our “P/G & Me Dance” on Saturday, April 18 at the Wilson-Gray YMCA
facility in Hartford
• We chose bright colors, inspirational posters, and decorative spring-like touches with
flowers and lanterns for decorations
• We bought ethnic food from Scott’s Bakery of Hartford to appeal to the demographic
and pizza from a local Big Y store
• To get last minute attendance members of the group went out into the community
surrounding the facility to get parents to come with their children

8. Success!
• We strongly believe that our event was very successful
• We had at least 50 participants and it was wonderful to see parents interacting with the
agencies present
• The children were running and playing and seemed to really enjoy themselves
• We provided additional resources to the parents about other agencies which could not be
present at our event
• At the end of the event as we were thanking the attendees, they thanked us for having the
event and a few expressed interest in attending a similar event in the future

9. Thank You
• Purpose Minded Stop and Shop
• Achieve Hartford Walmart
• CT Dental Health Partnership
• Harford Food Share
• Catholic Charities

10. Most importantly..
THANK YOU!
To our Leading Off Campus facilitators, Andre Santiago, Mae Ryan, and the
staff of Leadership Greater Hartford!