Community Engagement

Programs that treat families, staff, and neighbors as audiences whose trust is earned, not assumed. The work that determines whether a school's enrollment letter, a nonprofit's family update, or a local meeting actually reaches the people it's supposed to.

Why this is different from "marketing"

Marketing campaigns end. Community engagement doesn't. The audiences are the same year over year, often the same families, the same neighborhood, and the same staff. Trust accumulates or erodes through every email, ParentSquare message, family meeting, and bulletin board flyer.

The work is also rarely visible from the outside. A community engagement program done well looks like a school where 800 families read the weekly update and feel seen. A community engagement program done poorly looks like a school where the principal sends excellent emails that nobody opens.

What I deliver

• Family communications strategy. Editorial calendars, voice guidelines, and templates that survive after I leave. Built for the people who actually press send.
• Bilingual (EN/ES) communications, structurally. Not English plus a Spanish translation step. Both languages developed in parallel, with cultural fluency in both.
• Channel strategy for schools and community organizations. ParentSquare, email, SMS, social, in-person — which channel for which message, audited against what families actually read.
• Engagement program design. Family events, parent council communications, town halls, advisory groups. The structures that make community feel less like a slogan.

Where I do this work

Currently, as Head of Marketing & Communications at School in the Square — a PreK–12 dual-language English/Spanish public charter network in Washington Heights and Inwood serving 800+ students. Family engagement at S² is the daily work, not the campaign work.

Earlier work in NGO contexts (American Red Cross, SOS Children's Villages) involved community engagement at much larger scale: how international organizations talk to the communities they serve in countries where they are guests, not native institutions. Different rules, same underlying principle: the audience's trust is the only metric.

"A community engagement program done poorly looks like a school where the principal sends excellent emails that nobody opens."

When this work matters most

Transitions. New leadership. Enrollment cycles. Crisis response. Strategic plan rollouts. Periods when the organization is asking its community to trust something that hasn't been proven yet. The communications work in those moments either earns the trust or doesn't.