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“Building Social Support with Families: Practical Ideas and Tips,” a resource from the National AfterSchool Association, outlines ways that afterschool programs can engage families in promoting healthy out-of-school time environments for children. Suggestions include making sure snacks and meals are not only healthy but also culturally sensitive and inclusive and inviting family members to volunteer to coach sports or lead other physical education activities.

Produced by StriveTogether and ExpandEDSchool by TASC, this paper describes the ways that youth-serving community-based organizations can help prepare young people for success in school and life. It provides a framework for building a cradle-to-career infrastructure to support community partners and recommends ways for communities to build increasingly effective relationships among community-based organizations and other partners.

Partners in Education: A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships is a publication of SEDL in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education. The publication presents a new framework for designing family engagement initiatives that build capacity among educators and families to partner with one another around student success. Based in existing research and best practices, this report is designed to act as a scaffold for the development of family engagement strategies, policies, and programs.

Engaging Families in Afterschool is a webinar created especially for Illinois 21st CCLCs. The webinar will help afterschool programs strengthen and build a systemic approach to family engagement and highlight school- and district-level efforts. The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) will host and co-facilitate with SEDL's Illinois Quality Afterschool team. Before the webinar, participants can review ISBE’s Family Engagement Framework Guide and provide feedback.

“Learning Together: Creating a Community of Practice to Support English Language Learner Literacy” is a case study that examines an afterschool, bilingual family literacy program that brought together several groups to form a community of practice. The community of practice worked to support the literacy development of English language learners and their families. The authors explore the degree to which parents, teachers, students, and other school personnel interact within an afterschool family literacy program and learn from each other as a community of practice. They found that family literacy nights offered opportunities for collaboration among different communities of practice that did not exist during the regular school day. They suggest that participating in family literacy nights can be an important way to connect various school-based groups to one another and to linguistically diverse families, creating a community of practice united by participants' shared interest in literacy development. The article is published in the journal Language, Culture and Curriculum.

This video from PBS Learning Media highlights a literacy program designed to foster a love of reading among male students through community engagement. Reading Specialist Marilu Bicknell in Glassboro, NJ, was concerned by statistics showing that young boys are more interested in sports than books, so she created the Real Men Read Literacy Project at the Thomas E. Bowe Elementary School. The program consists of regular breakfasts with men in the community (including alumni, the town's mayor, athletes, and school janitors) and an afterschool book club for boys to explore various book genres with their peers. The website includes a video about the program and discussion questions.

The National Afterschool Association has created a Pinterest Board featuring parent communication ideas. Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo-sharing website on which you can browse, save, and share ideas. The parent communication resources include ideas for parent resource centers, parent communication templates, and activities that parents can do with their student to support academic achievement.

Every Hour Counts, formerly the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems, has developed a comprehensive set of messaging resources to help afterschool leaders discuss afterschool and other expanded-learning opportunities with stakeholders. They have resources to help afterschool professionals explain the role of expanded-learning in supporting student success, communicate about the impact of high-quality afterschool programs on attendance and graduation rates, academic performance, and social and emotional learning, and slides from a webinar addressing frequently asked questions about developing a message for your afterschool program.

The U.S. Department of Education’s You for Youth team has collaborated with afterschool practitioners and leaders to develop a family guidebook template for 21st CCLC grantees. Creating a family guidebook offers a way for programs to inform families about policies and procedures, and it also helps families become more involved in afterschool activities. This template provides suggestions, in an outline form, of possible components to include in your program’s family guidebook.

This report from the Wallace Foundation covers Better Together: Building Local Systems to Improve Afterschool, a national conference held in February 2013. Teams from 57 cities gathered to discuss how to improve afterschool programs and use data for informed decision making. The report covers topics such as sustainability, dropout prevention, data use, and high-quality programming for secondary students.