Sharing experiences about community schools in Cluj

Sixty school principals and members of school boards, as well as 10 community school facilitators, will come together on 22-24 September in Cluj-Napoca to share experiences in connecting schools and communities, discuss leadership and values in community schools, learn how to conduct asset mapping, and gather support for their community school. The training will be led by Chris Jones, executive director of the International Centre of Excellence for Community Schools, assisted by local facilitators. Serban Iosifescu, Chair of the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre – University Education, and Simona-David Crisbasanu, coordinator of the Education through Coaching project and co-founder of the Coalition for Education movement, will be guest speakers on the first day of the event.

New Horizons Foundation (NHF), the host of the event, organizes the event within its Schools Connected to the Communityproject, which aims to lay the foundation of a community school movement and network in Romania. This project builds on the Foundation’s 15-year experience in establishing IMPACT community service learning clubs, currently operating in 139 schools nationwide. As many of the community school principles are implicit in our work within the IMPACT Clubs, we think of community schools as an extension of the clubs’ work aiming to build a broader and deeper relationship with the community and school itself.

The project Schools Connected to the Community is implemented in 2016-2017 with financial support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and other contributors.