Building Bridges with Jennifer Mayer-Glenn

Paul Kuttner:

Welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore the art and science of collaboration. My name is Paul Kuttner. On this podcast, I speak with connectors, conveners, and bridge builders. These folks have dedicated themselves to breaking down the walls that divide us and getting people working together to improve our world.

On this inaugural episode of Partnership Work, you’ll get to listen in on my conversation with Jennifer Mayer-Glenn. Jenny is a longtime activist and educator who directs a center at the University of Utah called University Neighborhood Partners. Jenny is a consummate bridge builder, always looking for ways to bring folks together, whether at work or, as we’ll hear, around her dining room table.

In this interview, she opens up about her personal history, how her family and early experiences influenced why and how she does what she does. We discuss two different kinds of partnership work that Jenny’s been involved in. First, we talk about her years in the K-12 public school system and how she became a champion for getting educators and families working together to improve schools. Then she discusses her transition to higher education, where she’s been helping to lead a community-university partnership to build a brand new hospital.

Along the way, Jenny shares some real insight into what it takes to bridge between marginalized communities and systems, whether that’s the health system or the education system. We discuss the importance of place, that where people come together matters. And she talks about the fine balance between structuring the process of collaboration and letting the unexpected emerge. As Jenny says, there is a method to this partnership madness, and we’ll get a glimpse of that method in action.

Before we get to the interview, I want to say that I really appreciate each and every one of you for listening. Partnership work is my first foray into the podcast world, and there are definitely some rough edges around these first few episodes. But I’m sure the knowledge that my guests are dropping will more than make up for it. So I won’t keep you any longer. Let’s go to my interview with Jenny.

Paul:

I am so excited to introduce my guest today. She is a longtime colleague of mine and a friend who has definitely shaped how I think about partnership work. Jennifer Amador Mayer-Glenn is the director of University Neighborhood Partners at the University of Utah and special assistant to the president for campus-community partnerships. Before that, she spent over two decades in Salt Lake City public schools, where she led the charge to invest in family engagement. In fact, Jenny launched the district’s first Office of Family School Collaboration.

Beyond her professional work, Jenny is an activist for local education issues. She is also a former president of the Utah Coalition of La Raza. One thing that has always impressed me about Jenny is that she manages to be both a strong advocate and a bridge builder. Jenny, as always, it is so great to see you. Thank you for joining me.

Jennifer Mayer-Glenn:

Thank you, Paul. It is just an honor to be here with you. And as you said, being longtime colleagues has been a gift to me. And so I appreciate the time that we get to spend together today. Thank you.

Paul:

So, I want to start off with this: When you’re at Christmas dinner or a family reunion and one of your relatives asks, “What do you do?” What is your answer?

Jenny:

Oh gosh, that is a hard one. I typically start out by just acknowledging how beautiful it is that I get paid to work with community members and that my goal is to bridge between people and institutions that have power with people who…I’ll just say, the most marginalized. I like to use the term marginalized because I was a schoolteacher and in the curriculum you get a book and in the literal margin it will say “This is what you do for English learners” or “this is what you do for special ed kids.” So, for me, the term marginalized has a lot of meaning. I think about people that have been pushed out into margins that don’t have access to decision-making spaces or resources.

But I’ll also add to this, Paul, that for me, this goes back to my ancestry. I had ancestors on the Mayflower, and eventually those folks became Mormons and came across the plains to Mexican territory in 1846. And my Mexican ancestors came in the early 1900s to Utah. And so I grew up in a space where I really had this knowledge, this understanding, of people that had access and people who didn’t have access. For me, it really created this idea of fairness.

And I would say that even within my own immediate family I felt that same way, I was the peacemaker in the family. I’m the third child of six. And over the years I’ve extrapolated. I’ve grown that identity, hearing stories from my father about not getting access to a scholarship because his father wasn’t ever told about it, because why would the Mexican kid need a scholarship to higher ed? He joined the military in order to get the GI Bill. And just recognizing that these disconnects that exist throughout our society. And so I’ve positioned myself to try to bridge between those that are more marginalized and those that have power.

Paul:

Tell me a little more about what your parents specifically did and how that shaped the work that you do today.

Jenny:

My father was a professor at the University of Utah, and his father worked on the railroad. And he had my father in the summers work on the railroad. My father, his brother, the cousins, they would all work on the railroad, and my grandfather would walk up and down the railroad and say to them, “Do you want to do this for the rest of your life? If you don’t want to do this for the rest of your life, get an education.” So, from a very young age he was taught like education is a way is access right it’s access to power is access to a better life.

And he went with that. He went into higher ed, got a PhD, and then was teaching ethnic studies at the University of Utah. He helped start the Ethnic Studies department. He started the Chicano scholarship program at the University of Utah. And I remember as a child going to the NACCS conference, the National Association of Chicano Studies and going to Teatro Campesino, which at the time I didn’t know much about, but I got to experience that. It left an impression on me. And as I got older and learned more about it, I just realized that I was exposed to some really important moments and experience as a kid.

My mother, she was the president of the League of Women Voters for Davis County, which is kind of a bedroom community of Salt Lake City. And I remember going to meetings with her. She would host a lot of Meet the Candidates nights. But it was always like, “We need to be involved in the process, in the political process.” And so I grew up being aware of that as well. So I did get a lot of examples from both of my parents. 

Paul:

We’ll move forward a bit. So, you started working in schools as a paraeducator, and then you moved into full-time teaching before becoming an administrator. At what point did you recognize that there was an issue around the relationship between families and educators in the schools? Was there a specific experience or person you remember that helped you see that that was something that needed to be worked on?

Jenny:

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. And so I went to the school district and I got hired immediately as a paraeducator to teach English as a second language. And one of the things that happened early on to me is that I would have special education teachers come to me and say, “Does this child have a disability?” And that made me furious. I thought, there is something not right here. There is something unjust going on. And that was when I decided to get licensed as a special ed teacher, because I wanted to try to unpack this thing that I could see that was a problem: the fact that English learners were being referred to special education at higher rates than other students.

Through that process, I recognized that the only kind of interaction that was coming from parents in this context was so minimal. It was three questions on a registration form asking them about their children’s language and their primary home language. And that would be it. And then there would be a requirement to do a parent interview, but it was always done in a very check-the-box kind of way. I think that was one of the beginning points for me, knowing that because the family spoke a different language and it made it a little harder for a teacher to be able to have a conversation with them, that they were being excluded from this bigger conversation about their child.

Paul:

What were some of the first things you tried to do to address that issue?

Jenny:

Gosh, it was so basic. It was just like, “Let’s make sure that we have good interpreters who are able to give that minimal kind of access to parents.” And then once I was in the role, it was more about making sure that I was doing the best job that I could do within that space. I would do the interviews with parents and try to be more thoughtful and really try to develop a relationship with them.

Paul:

Can I dig in here? I’m curious, what does it look like for Jennifer Mayer-Glenn to build relationships and trust with someone?

Jenny:

Well, in the context of a school, it’s about inviting people to the space and making it a comfortable, welcoming space for them and also visiting them at home. I know that for teachers going to a parent’s home can be really uncomfortable, but it’s about that acknowledgement that what you are and who you are is also important. It’s about listening. It’s being in spaces together, breaking bread together if you can, and listening and being curious about each other.

Paul:

How did you start to transition from that kind of individual engagement and relationship building to this idea of partnership?

Jenny:

I became a teacher coach and I was in the equity department at the district office. And one of the things that we were doing was having Courageous Conversations about race and education with teams of teachers at school. And in these conversations, we were really examining the kinds of assumptions that we make about families.

I would hear a lot from teachers in those settings about assumptions that they were making. Teachers were starting to make assumptions about whether or not a parent cared about their child’s education. And I know —  back to my dad’s story about the importance of education or his father’s belief about the importance of education — that education is important to families that are coming from Mexico. On the other hand, I’m hearing from teachers, “Those parents don’t care about their kids’ education.” And so for me, that was a moment of “okay, there’s a disconnect here. So how can I be a bridge?” Because I know that those assumptions are having a negative impact on a child’s education. So how can I help be that bridge.

Paul:

So what did you do?

Jenny:

So what I did, and this was when I became an administrator at a middle school, we had dialogues together. We brought parents and teachers together around a round table and we had them answer the same questions. At first they were questions about identifying common values, and then getting into some of the issues that I knew that were popping up. Like, “Let’s talk about how we discipline kids.” I wanted teachers to be able to hear how parents discipline kids and parents to be able to hear how teachers discipline kids because that was a disconnect that was happening in the school. And what everyone heard was that everybody does it the same way. There are a lot of commonalities and within those commonalities we can find those spaces to work together to become partners.

Paul:

That sounds really powerful. I’m curious about what happened next. But first, I want to ask you how you brought that group together. For various reasons, teachers and parents don’t often have a lot of opportunities to just sit down and dialogue. So how did you kind of pitch that as a leader? And how did you invite folks to the table?

Jenny:

I decided that we needed to go with the willing. Let’s start with the willing. And there are definitely always teachers who are open and want to learn more and want to improve what they’re doing. We were a highly diverse school and teachers wanted to learn more about specific ethnicities or specific cultural groups. We would create a panel, let’s say, of the Somali community for example. And it would be a safe space for a teacher to come because they were just listening, right? And then they could ask some questions. So, we started there.

And then the next thing was to move that around a round table and bring people together in conversation. And it was building the excitement or the passion of the teachers by seeing this, like, “Oh, I’m learning something new. This is something that’s going to help me.” I was building trust with them, right? They were beginning to trust me more, that the things that we were going to try together would be something that they could learn from and something that would be useful to them. So, it was about the trust built between me and teachers and me and parents and then bringing them together.

Paul:

What was the outcome of that set of dialogues?

Jenny:

What happened was that teachers started to see the students as more human and their families as more human. They started to ask more questions of the students and they started to increase their expectations of the students. Once they met the parents and once they had an interaction with parents that completely shifted how they worked with the kids in their in their classrooms. And so the end of that two-year story or three-year story is that the school where I was working had an F grade on the state of Utah grading system. After two years of not only the family engagement work that we did, but other things that we did in the school, we became a B+ school. And those grades were based on student achievement, right? It was growth on student achievement, on tests that students were taking. So, it had a significant impact. 

Paul:

What was one of the first lessons you had to learn on how to do this work well?

Jenny:

One of the biggest lessons I think that I had to learn was to trust the process. That I didn’t have to have the answers. That by bringing people together, that they learn from each other and that it’s hugely impactful. And you can’t predict what the learning is going to be and really it doesn’t matter. What matters is that this space has been created, this process. This opportunity for trust building and partnership building is the most important piece.

Paul:

Do you remember times when maybe you feel like you didn’t trust the process enough? Maybe you tried to force things or tried to overdetermine things?

Jenny:

Yeah, for sure. This one actually is not between parents and the school, but within the school. As a teacher, you’re taught that you have the answers, right? That’s what you’re supposed to do is to teach other people to know what you know. I was working with these teacher teams, and I was trying to control the agenda because I wanted to relieve the burden from them of having to come to another meeting and do another thing. And it fell flat every time because it wasn’t about them. It was about me. It was about what I needed. It wasn’t about what they needed. And that was a huge lesson for me. Get out of the way. You don’t need to be in the way. You don’t need to be controlling what’s going on. Step out of the way, give the space to other people, and they are going to utilize the space in the way that best fits their needs.

Paul:

I love that.

Jenny:

I’ll just add that I’ve also noticed when I’ve gone too far, when there does need to be some structure. There was a moment in a staff meeting not too long ago and I said, “Wll right, everybody, Jesus is going to come take the wheel. I am not Jesus and somebody’s got to take this wheel right now. I’m going to take the wheel.” You’ve got to find that sweet area, the between space where it’s like the process is happening, the productivity — I don’t love the word productivity — where the knowledge is being created, the relationships are being built. And you can’t overprescribe how that happens, but you also need to create some amount of structure to create the space for it.

Paul:

Let’s come back to that as we talk about the next step in your journey. You had the opportunity to launch your district’s first Office of Family-School Collaboration. You became its first director abd all of a sudden you were working at a district-wide level. What was your vision for what needed to happen? And could you share an example of one of the initiatives that you put in place when you were the director?

Jenny:

Gosh, there was so much. Again, it was about helping to build knowledge of school staff and educators on the importance of family engagement, bringing research in, that was important. But also helping families understand how the system works. It was very clear to me that it’s really hard to bring those two groups together and have them be able to talk about this thing called education when teachers speak jargon and parents don’t understand how the system works. And for me, having a ton of respect for educators and a ton of respect for families as well, knowing that there’s just so much that could be shared across.

So how to do that? How do you create those spaces? One of the spaces that I was really intentional about was called the Parent Advisory Council. The purpose of the Parent Advisory Council was to be a space where leaders in the district and parents could have trusted conversations about important things to the parents and to the educators. And then to learn from each other in that space. So, I wanted to make sure that the council was representative of the parents in the district. I literally went through and made sure it demographically represented the district as a whole. And I asked them what they would like to know more about the district. And then I lined up district staff to come in and be able to share information.

I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit because what I had to do first was to build the trust in the in the group. So, the first time we got together, we did a community building circle. There’s a book called Circle Forward that’s used for restorative justice kinds of circles in schools. And I use that to help guide that process. But what we did was we did a circle on values. And that was the first time we met. And then the next time we met, I had an educator come in to talk about standards and curriculum and what’s the difference between standards and curriculum. And I said to her, “I want you to think about, if you could ask parents any question that you wanted to about the work you’re doing, what would you want to ask them?” And so, she had thought ahead of time about what she might want to learn from parents in the context of her work. Then we all came together again for that second meeting and we sat in a circle, we did a community building question that everybody answered.

We were in the district office, so it’s a space of power, and trying to figure out how to reduce that. So the educator did a presentation um here’s some knowledge I said keep it short, like ten minutes of information: this is what standards are, this is what a curriculum looks like and this is a book that may be used in a classroom um and then her questions, I wish I could remember exactly what they were but they were good questions. And this was so important, because the superintendent was in the room at the same time. So, the top leader of the district is in the room when the questions are asked of the parents.

And what we heard loud and clear was that there were some parents who didn’t feel like the kids were learning about their own history in the classroom and that they were having a hard time connecting to what they were learning because they don’t get to learn about themselves. And that moment for me was so important because it wasn’t about me saying what I thought might be the case about a certain group of parents or whatever. It was the parent saying it directly to the person who was making decisions about it. And that is far more powerful than it coming from me.

Paul:

And that’s another example, like you said earlier, of getting out of the way.

Jenny:

Yeah, absolutely. Getting out of the way is so important. 

Paul:

I also just want to note, this is the second time you’ve talked about how the space or the place that you’re doing this work in matters. Like, when you’re bridging between families and schools, what does it mean to do work in the school or even in the district versus outside of the school or even in someone’s home? And it seems to be tied up with power. Can you talk about how you think about place when you’re building partnerships?

Jenny:

I love this question. There are very formal kinds of places that decisions are being made, and you can’t remove them — it’s going to happen in that space. A school is a good example. A city council meeting room is a good example. Those spaces are going to exist. And we can do our best to try to make them welcoming spaces for people, but they are intimidating spaces. And so, one of the important things about doing this kind of bridging work is that you do have to do things in those spaces. You have to help people become more comfortable in those spaces because decisions are going to continue to be made in those spaces.

And at the same time, I think there’s so much value in more informal spaces, in spaces where people feel like they have more ownership of or it’s just safe. It’s just a safe space. And that can be in somebody’s home. Or, at University Neighborhood Partners we have our partnership center where the wall color was selected by community members and there’s a lot of community ownership of the space. And therefore, it’s a safe space where certain things can happen. It feels like home.

I have my own space. I’ve utilized my dining room table for a lot of years, and it just sort of happened. I think it was because I could afford it. It was like, “I don’t have to rent whatever space. I have my dining room table. I’m going to invite people to it. So come on over people.” And it’s been a space where there’ve been lots of entertainment or parties or things like that. But it’s also been a more kind of formal space where I’ve invited people to talk about, for example, the achievement gap (back in the day when we used the terminology achievement gap). I remember putting it out there and inviting a school board member and a teacher and an administrator and activists from the community and parents, for everyone to come together around this, to have a conversation. And I made food and we ate together. And there wasn’t a goal so much with some kind of action to come at the end, but it was about bringing people together to just be in the conversation. It was about trusting that process.

Do I know what happened from that? If there was some kind of long-term impact or short-term impact, I don’t know. But my guess is that yes, that the school board member may have made a different kind of decision because of that conversation. Or the parent may have had built some confidence to be able to go in and talk to somebody in the school about an issue around their child. This is me just guessing about what can happen, but I do think that it has an impact. And that is a different kind of space altogether, right?

Paul:

Please finish your story. You put together the advisory board and you brought in the teacher. You were just about to talk about what you saw as the ripples or the results of that work.

Jenny:

After that particular time, I took lots of notes. So, I had this big list of quotes that I was able to go and start sharing with other educators, with other decision makers at the district level. And what I discovered through that process was that at the time, the leaders in the district weren’t very interested in being responsive to it. And because I had taken all of this time to build trusting relationships with this group of humans that I cared about I had to protect that, which meant that I had to basically say this isn’t going to work.

And maybe this is where place comes into it. This was the district office. This was a place where the decisions are made. And I couldn’t be assured that things were going to happen for this group of parents that were trusting me. And that was when I was just like, “I can’t keep asking them to come and trust me when nothing is going to change.” And it was not long after that that I put out into the universe that my vision for family engagement did not align with the leaders in the district and that I was actually willing to walk away from the district. 

Paul:

You left the district. You took a role as the Director of University Neighborhood Partners, which is a part of the University of Utah, but it’s located in the west side communities that it’s focused on and centered around in order to build partnerships between the communities and higher ed. What was that transition like and what did you have to learn or struggle with along the way?

Jenny:

It was so liberating. Right off. It was just incredibly liberating because the K-12 system is very rigid and there’s just not a lot of creativity in which priorities that you get to focus on. Or you’re boxed into standards and education and reading and math and so on and so forth. So, to be able to step out of that kind of space into: guess what? There’s a lot of unfairness across our entire society. There are so many things to work on and to focus on.

It was liberating and overwhelming, just knowing how systems and institutions are so entrenched without the knowledge from the people that they are wanting to serve. But I think that we have gotten so lockstep in our institutions and there’s so much policy that has been created in the name of efficiency or in the name of education. Bylaws and Robert’s Rules of Order. And I don’t mean to throw out all of the rules, that is not what I’m saying, but I think that our systems and our institutions have just have been designed by and for a certain group of people and. And so, as those systems and institutions are designed to support one group of people more, there’s lots of opportunity to try to bring those voices into those spaces.

Paul:

Could you give me an example of one partnership you’ve been involved in that did this bridging between systems and community over the past five years at UNP?

Jenny:

Yes, I can. One thing that was very new for me in coming into this work was around health care. The University of Utah, by looking at their data, saw that there are health disparities in the west side of Salt Lake County. And so there were a group of people that said we should build a hospital on the west side of Salt Lake County so that we can try to have a positive impact on the health disparities. Such a beautiful lovely noble thing to do and I’m really appreciative of the people in those spaces that were making that decision. And as things went on and as COVID came and suddenly the price of building materials and humans building things just skyrocketed. And there was this moment of whether or not the university could really afford to build a hospital.

At the same time that all of that was going on, we also were intentionally doing a lot of community engagement work to help inform the health care system, the hospitals and clinics, about how the community might want to see this hospital designed. And in that conversation, one of the tools that UNP has is what’s called a resident committee. And it’s essentially a group of individuals from the community who come together and are kind of a leadership group. And within that work, there’s capacity building of the people in that space to understand better how, in this case, healthcare systems work, but also giving them access to decision makers so that they can speak to the decision makers.

So, leaders from the health care system and other places at the university were coming together regularly for lunch with the community members and they built relationships. This is such an important piece to this story. They built these important relationships. and when it came down to the decision of whether or not the university was going to be able to afford to build a hospital that group of leaders and community members came together and it was in that moment when community members felt like that they could speak their truth and say “We need this. Please do this.” And those decision makers at that time said, “Okay, we’re going to do a hard thing.” And it became a priority for the university at that point to identify the funds that would be needed to invest in this hospital. That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for those relationships and that trust that was built within that group of people.

Paul:

Wow. I love that. It’s a beautiful story and it’s very unusual. it’s almost the opposite of the story you told about your advisory board that you built in the district where you built it and it wasn’t listened to. And then you were on the hook.

What would surprise someone who’s unfamiliar with the kind of work you do?

Jenny:

I think what would surprise someone is that there actually is a method. I think that a lot of times people hear “community engagement” and they’re like, “Oh, there’s some fluffy people coming together, whatever, whatever.” But there actually is a method. And while the process of bringing people together and having them talk to each other is really impactful, like I said before, there does need to be structure. And so it’s that there is a method that you can utilize to do this work.

Paul:

That’s all of my questions. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we close our conversation?

Jenny:

Yeah, I would just say that um that the solutions to the things that are problematic in our community, the solutions are in the community. They know. Community members know what needs to happen. Systems want to be solutions. And if we can just bring the people together with people in those systems to start examining the systems, solutions will emerge and we can fix things.”

Paul:

Perfect. That’s great. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun.