When Alejandra and her son Diego first moved to San Francisco’s Mission District from El Salvador to escape gang-related violence, they faced overwhelming challenges. Diego was struggling in school academically and socially and Alejandra with finding steady work. They were sharing a single room in an overcrowded apartment. But Alejandra found a lifeline through a resource at Diego’s San Francisco public school. A “family success coach” connected Diego to English tutoring and school supplies and Alejandra to affordable housing, legal representation, and food support.
Diego and Alejandra got the help they needed through a program of San Francisco’s Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), a non-profit community-development organization in the city with a long history of supporting Latino immigrant families. MEDA, in turn, is part of the Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN), a cradle-to-career program launched with a federal Promise Neighborhoods grant in 2012.
MEDA’s school-based family success coaches, who are all fluent in Spanish, build relationships with families and connect them to a wide range of mutually reinforcing student and family resources of the sort that Diego and Alexandra received. The goal is for families to become self-sufficient, putting them on a pathway to upward mobility.
The interconnected system of supports MEDA has developed across the prenatal-to-career continuum is paying significant dividends. More than 70 percent of preschool children in MPN’s programs are “kindergarten ready” by the time they attend public school while the graduation rate at MPN’s partner high school has increased from 68 percent in 2012 to 90 percent in 2022. MEDA has also preserved or built more than 2,000 affordable residential and commercial units.
In 2023, MPN broadened its family coaching strategy to include a student support model called Success Planning. Developed by the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, it connects each child to an adult “navigator” who creates a personalized plan for a child in partnership with their families and other caring adults. The plan identifies supports, enrichments, and other resources to help students through a whole-child approach.
The work of MEDA, MPN, and EdRedesign points to five core lessons for supporting immigrant families:
- Build relationships and trust with students and families. Family success coaches say it’s only when they’ve built trust among children and families do they share their challenges candidly. A key to trust-building is giving families a central role in developing plans to address their challenges.
- See each child as an individual with unique interests, abilities, and needs and develop both their academic and non-academic talents and skills.
- Listen to what families say they need. Address what you can in the short term and build to meet other needs in the long term. Mission Promise Neighborhood families identified affordable stable housing as a primary need. Over time, MEDA created an ambitious housing strategy.
- Find an entry point through an existing community asset—a community schools program, a robust afterschool partner, a strong mentoring program—and build from there.
- Create partnerships with local community-based organizations and service providers that are already serving families and children.
While federal Promise Neighborhoods funding and infrastructure accelerated MEDA/MPN’s progress, there are practical ways for schools and communities to support immigrant families without federal funding. This can be done by braiding and blending other funding streams, leveraging community resources, identifying in-kind services, and prioritizing collaboration.
Public schools serve all children in their communities, regardless of how they got there. As the national immigration debate unfolds in the coming months and years, local communities need to come together to ensure immigrant children and families get the supports and opportunities they need.
Richard Raya is the CEO of Marin Promise Partnership and a former senior advisor to the Mission Promise Neighborhood. Tauheedah Jackson is deputy director of EdRedesign at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Lynne Sacks is EdRedesign’s research director and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.