Trust Is the Curriculum: How St. Louis Park Schools Equipped the People Families Already Trust

St. Louis Park Public Schools in Minnesota have educators that families trust. Their Multicultural Family Liaisons are the bridge between schools, students, and the communities they serve. The question isn't getting families involved. It's equipping the people they already trust to lead family learning, not run family events. That is what St. Louis Park Public Schools brought Coaction Collective in to explore.

CoCo started by listening

Before CoCo built a single slide, the team sat down with each liaison for a one-on-one conversation. The goal was simple: understand their strengths, name their challenges, and learn what they actually needed to grow as facilitators. Eight liaisons, eight conversations, one clear picture.

A few things came through loud and consistent.

• The liaisons are trusted connectors. Families come to them, talk to them, and rely on them in ways that are hard to manufacture and easy to take for granted.

• Enrollment, events, advisory work: the district had that foundation in place. The opportunity now is partnership around learning itself, where families and schools work together on how a child grows.

• Immigrant families in particular came ready: invested in their children's success, looking for real partnership. The systems weren't built to meet them there yet.

The findings of CoCo's listening shaped everything that followed. CoCo designed two sessions for the Multicultural Liaisons, built around research-backed frameworks and CoCo's own facilitation methodology.

Session One: reframing what family engagement means

The first session reframed and centered the working definition of family engagement, drawing on the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships (Mapp and Bergman). The focus was moving liaisons past the narrow idea that a family "shows up" or "doesn't," toward a fuller view of everything families do to drive student success at home and in partnership with school.

Liaisons reflected on their own experience and connected it back to the framework, turning an abstract model into something personal and recognizable. The frameworks became stories liaisons could name in their own lives.

The session closed on a question that set up everything next: what do families know that schools have never thought to ask about?

Session Two: from what's missing to what's here

The second session named the lens shift directly. A deficit lens sees gaps and treats engagement as fixing the family. An asset lens sees the knowledge, skill, and capital families already carry and treats engagement as building on that strength. Same family, different starting assumption, completely different practice.

CoCo grounded that shift in two bodies of research: Funds of Knowledge (Moll, González, and Amanti), which names the everyday expertise households build to survive and thrive, knowledge most schools never think to ask about, and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso), which names the forms of capital families of color carry that schools are often trained to overlook. Both frameworks push back on the idea that some families arrive with capital and others arrive empty. Everyone carries capital. The question is which kinds a school is built to see.

CoCo connected that wealth back to Session One, so liaisons could see the throughline: what families do is powered by what families know intrinsically. 

Putting the camera in families' hands

The session moved from theory to method with PhotoVoice, a participatory approach (Wang and Burris) where people document their own lives in photographs and then discuss those images in their own words. It is built to surface strengths and concerns from the inside, spark honest dialogue, and move what surfaces toward the people who can act on it.

CoCo drew directly from co-founder Dr. Michael Andrews's own PhotoVoice research with Black fathers navigating family-school partnerships, work that centers families as knowledge-producers rather than subjects to be studied. Liaisons then ran a mini PhotoVoice project themselves, each finding a photo capturing a strength in their own family or community and working through CoCo's guided reflection protocol to unpack it.

The liaisons left with a method they can turn around and run in their own communities.

What's next?

This was Phase One: listening, framing, and equipping. It established a shared language across the liaison team and a foundation the district can build on with training decks, facilitator guides, and tools that let liaisons deliver consistent, high-quality family learning across the system.

The strategy is straightforward. Invest in the people families already trust. Give them frameworks that honor what families bring. Hand them methods that center family voice. The capacity stays in the district long after the engagement ends.

For districts thinking about this work

If your district is weighing how to make family engagement genuinely culturally responsive, start where St. Louis Park did. Find the people your families already trust, listen to them first, and build their capacity to lead.

Coaction Collective partners with districts to do exactly this work, from listening tours and liaison professional learning to full districtwide family engagement strategy. If you are ready to move family engagement from events to partnership, the team would like to talk.

Reach the team at Hello@coactioncollective.com or visit www.coactioncollective.com.