Red PaPaz

Red PaPaz empowers families to understand the issues their children face and to take action to transform the Colombian education system. As an advocacy coalition, Red PaPaz engages parent networks in schools across the nation to identify challenges, debate solutions, generate local demand for change, and share political action strategies. It leverages diverse engagement channels, from WhatsApp videos to regional conferences, to help parents understand and address important issues ranging from nutrition to abuse and neglect. Parents work in partnership with their communities to move beyond raising awareness to pursuing political action, such as lobbying Congress or demanding funding from their local school board (C. Piñeros & A. Vélez, personal communication, May 18, 2021).

Founded in 2003, Red PaPaz was designed by parents, for parents. For years, parent associations from 34 schools across Bogotá lamented the lack of consolidated information networks for families (Red PaPaz, 2017a). Where such education networks existed, they rarely addressed the issues parents cared most about—those that prevented their child from thriving. What discouraged parents from advocating for their children was not a lack of desire or drive but rather lack of knowledge about their child’s safety and development. Additionally, parents lacked the resources to take action. Red PaPaz was formed as an education, engagement, and advocacy network that meets each parent where they are and walks them through a process of awareness raising, capacity building, and change making.

Red PaPaz’s campaigns flexibly focus on broad issues affecting children’s lives, such as safety, inclusion, and school environment. Among its many achievements, Red PaPaz spearheaded the signing of a 2018 pact by the Office of the Attorney General, which called for the eradication of human trafficking and sexual exploitation of youths in digital environments (Red PaPaz, 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization’s network reported surging child abuse as a result of lockdowns. In response, Red PaPaz quickly turned its attention to school reopening, collecting data, and eventually suing the government to force a return to schooling (C. Piñeros & A. Vélez, personal communication, May 18, 2021; Red PaPaz, 2017b). This, like all Red PaPaz campaigns, was guided by a three-step strategy: First, community members and experts partnered to identify a problem affecting children. Second, stakeholders developed parent-accessible communication tools and strategies that allowed for awareness and encouraged a mindset shift. Third, the network disseminated concrete opportunities for collective action.

To support its advocacy efforts, tRed PaPaz has a resource hub that includes virtual events, tools, and libraries. Red PaPaz works with nearly 700,000 parents across 481 educational institutions and operates in 22 of Colombia’s 32 geographic departments (C. Piñeros & A. Vélez, personal communication, May 18, 2021).

Advocacy in action: In 2010 Red PaPaz received a partnership invitation from an organization working to support children with disabilities. Red PaPaz members quickly mobilized to learn about the issue through their networks, tapping into parent hubs and contacting experts across the nation. Leaders soon learned that, at the time, children were segregated by ability in schools and often were refused access to classrooms based on the nature of their disabilities. Red PaPaz designed an online network that enabled all community members—including children themselves—to follow the organization’s findings on this issue of inclusion. Through meetings with schools across the nation, the organization quickly learned that a core barrier for principals was lack of funding, staff, and resources to support children with disabilities. Red PaPaz mounted a solutions-based campaign that began, as always, with developing and disseminating information on the injustice of exclusion and the resource constraints on diverse schools. Local parent networks soon took up the cause using action recommendations from Red PaPaz. Parents lobbied their local school boards for additional funding and wrote letters to Congress to demand changes in national legislation. A few years later, in 2014, Congress passed a new law mandating access for all students to every school. As a result of this visible success, parents began entering the network to share their own challenges and struggles. This led to diverse campaigns ranging from child abuse legislation to funding to combat drugs at school (C. Piñeros & A. Vélez, personal communication, May 18, 2021).

Goal: Improve attendance and completion, Improve learning and development
Student age: Early Childhood, Primary, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary
Tech level: No Tech
Lever: Providing Information, Building Relationships, Designing
Place: Community
Family role: Creating
Monthly parent-school meetings organized by parent networks: Red PaPaz organizes its networks into hubs of 20-30 schools, each coordinated by a regional head. These hubs tap two parents and two staff leaders from each school to participate in monthly meetings—either virtual or in-person. At the monthly gatherings, parents share emergent concerns and suggestions, which are relayed to the national team. At the same time, facilitators introduce issues compiled by the national team for local discussion. Red PaPaz arranges meeting logistics, and participants receive tools and resources to support their needs. Afterward, the hub organizes further trainings and political actions to implement any relevant advocacy campaigns at the regional level.

Goal: Improve attendance and completion, Improve learning and development
Student age: Early Childhood, Primary, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary
Tech level: No Tech
Lever: Providing Information, Building Skills
Place: Community
Family role: Supporting
Creating clear communication between content experts and parents: To bridge the communication gap between parents and the more than 40 experts who work with Red PaPaz, the organization provides comprehensive training on how to communicate with parents. Once a major youth development problem such as mental health or internet accessibility is identified, Red PaPaz works with allies and partners to identify the best experts to speak with parents and the best approaches for accessible, impactful communication. Red PaPaz first conducts parent focus groups led by communications experts to determine how parents understand various language choices and data points. This informs trainings for content experts, such as child protection lawyers, on how to translate their knowledge into a parent-friendly format. Beyond content delivery, trainings have an empathetic component such that experts are made aware of terms that may be uncomfortable or challenging for parents—for example, the term “learning deficit.” Red PaPaz encourages experts to communicate in ways that ground their insights in issues of systemic inequalities rather than in individual choice.

Goal: Improve learning and development
Student age: Early Childhood, Primary, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary
Tech level: High-tech
Place: Home
Lever: Providing Information, Providing Resources, Building Skills
Family role: Supporting
Online resource hubs for parents: Red PaPaz offers a suite of evidence-based resources and activities to help parents respond to the developmental needs of their children. Specific focus areas include promoting family-school alliances and creating protective home environments. For example, some pedagogical guides might help parents navigate learning disabilities in the home. Others promote educational uses of mobile devices and computers, such as by linking to online math games. Toolkits provide resources ranging from grief management exercises for children experiencing trauma to activities that foster appreciation of diversity. Additional resources include research studies, reports, and podcasts, which are translated for parents’ use. The multitude of engagement options empowers parents to understand and address key issues facing their children in a format of their choice.

Goal: Improve attendance and completion, Improve learning and development
Student age: Early Childhood, Primary, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary
Tech level: No Tech
Lever: Providing Information, Shifting Mindsets, Building Skills, Designing
Place: Community
Family role: Creating
Parent-led advocacy campaigns to address educational concerns: Red PaPaz empowers families to demand action and advocate for their child’s rights through a three-step campaign strategy. Through parent-school meetings, parents’ ideas and challenges filter up through the organization. Red PaPaz uses this information to select its campaign issues. Next, experts work with parents through focus groups to develop parent-accessible communication tools and strategies. With this awareness and demand for change, Red PaPaz shares concrete calls to action throughout its parent networks across the country. Mobilization efforts have focused on issues such as promoting positive parenting practices, healthy eating, and responsible and constructive use of information and communication technologies, as well as prevention of substance and child abuse. Through these efforts, families become reform warriors and play an integral role in transforming the systems and policies that directly affect their children.

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Families

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Technology

COVID-19 considerations

Red PaPaz’s advocacy successes depend heavily on accessible communication strategies. Each campaign begins with extensive background research in partnership with expert networks, including communications specialists and academics studying inclusive schools. After these preparatory meetings, Red PaPaz collaboratively translates complex policy problems into simple materials, such as WhatsApp videos. Focus group meetings with parents across Colombia enable the organization to further hone its message. Trainings with regional facilitators ensure a collective understanding of why certain language was selected. Red PaPaz focuses first on achieving basic awareness with a unified language, before advancing mindset shift and, eventually, tangible actions for each community, such as making phone calls to Congressional representatives or speaking with school principals. All of this depends on building consistent communication channels between parents, school staff, and Red PaPaz facilitators. Meetings are regularly scheduled and democratically structured, ensuring parents know exactly when they can share emergent concerns from their communities and precisely how they will receive resources to contribute to advocacy campaigns.

Red PaPaz emphasizes building an extended network of human capital in order to cultivate knowledge and execute campaigns. Its decentralized structure helps it respond to the needs of local parents by tapping local resources. The organization as a whole maintains partnerships with stakeholders including schools, parents, and other organizations throughout Colombia that seek to defend children’s rights. These strong relationships allow Red PaPaz to spread its work across the country despite massive variations in local circumstances and capacity. To facilitate this effort, Red PaPaz also cultivates alliances between parents, teachers, and education administrators. The organization encourages leaders to maintain ongoing dialogues at the school level that focus on children’s current needs and the resources required to meet them. For example, when parents sat down with principals to discuss the injustice of excluding students with disabilities, leaders quickly expressed their support for change but noted that they required additional resources to make this shared ambition a reality. These two-way conversations use deep listening practices to ensure all stakeholders are united under collective goals instead of passing blame onto local education systems (C. Piñeros & A. Vélez, personal communication, May 18, 2021).

Red PaPaz. (2017a). Cómo nace la rad [How the network was born]. https://www.redpapaz.org/category/sobre-red-papaz/como-nace-la-red/

Red PaPaz. (2017b). Entre todos: Exijo el derecho al recreo YA [Among everyone: I demand the right to education NOW]. https://entretodos.redpapaz.org/es/movilizaciones/yoexijoelderechoalrecreoya

Red PaPaz. (2018, September 26). Colombia firmó el Gran Pacto por la erradicación de la Trata de personas y la Explotación sexual comercial de niños, niñas y adolescentes en los entornos digitales [Achievements: Colombia signed the grand pact for the eradication of human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents in digital environments]. Logros. https://www.redpapaz.org/conectados-para-protegerlos-vi-encuentro-internacional-para-el-manejo-y-la-prevencion-de-la-explotacion-sexual-en-linea-de-ninas-ninos-y-adolescentes/