Find Community Partners that Support Your School’s Goals
If your school is struggling with attendance, behavior, or getting families more engaged, you’ll find support here. Caring for Kids brings the community partners, coaching, and structure to help you reach your goals, without adding more work to your team’s plate.
Leading a School Can Be a Lonely Job
Between academics, behavior, staff morale, and family engagement, a principal is stretched in every direction without anyone else who fully understands the weight of it. Does this sound familiar?
- Building outside support takes time you don’t have
- Every goal competes for the same limited resources
- You feel like you’re carrying your school alone
With limited time and resources it can feel like your school will never meet its goals. Worse, you go day after day seeing kids being underserved.
Caring for Kids is here to help with the support you need.
With Caring for Kids, You Have All the Help You Need
Caring for Kids connects schools with local community organizations who have the manpower and resources you’ve been waiting for. Our four step process ensures partnerships start strong, set clear goals, and develop into long-term relationships focused on serving the people who matter most: the kids in your school.
Every partnership is driven by your school’s own agenda. You define the goals, name one liaison for your school, and get support from our experienced coaches. The coach recruits, vets, and connects the right community partners for the goals you’ve set, and stays involved throughout the year to keep it on track.
If you want to reach your goals, join a Lunch & Learn to see how we can help make it happen.
How Our Partners Support Your School
You bring your goals, and your community partners work backward from that into real projects. From attendance parties to food drives, every project ties back to what matters. Here are where schools often request help:
Attendance
Attendance parties, attendance contracts, and mentoring for chronically absent students. Partners lead projects that get kids showing up consistently.
Achievement
Tutoring, mentoring, and academic support that partners build around your school’s specific learning goals.
Behavior
Mentoring and positive-reinforcement projects that help students build better behavior habits over the school year.
Social-Emotional
Support that helps students manage emotions, build resilience, and feel secure at school.
Belonging
Projects that help every student feel seen, included, and connected to their school community.
Staff Satisfaction
Appreciation and support projects that help your teachers and staff feel valued.
Family Engagement
Projects that bring families into the school community and strengthen the connection between home and school.
Where We Serve
We currently partner with 7 school districts and 7 charter schools across Jackson, Johnson, and Wyandotte counties. If your school falls within one of these communities, you already qualify.
Center School District
Community partners are active in Center schools, working toward the goals each principal sets.
Grandview School District
Grandview schools are matched with community partners built around their goals.
Hickman Mills School District
Hickman Mills schools partner with local businesses, faith groups, and nonprofits through CFK.
Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools
Kansas City, Kansas schools connect with community partners through the CFK network.
Kansas City Public Schools
KCPS schools are matched with community partners built around their goals.
Raytown School District
Raytown schools partner with local businesses, faith groups, and nonprofits through CFK.
Shawnee Mission School District
Shawnee Mission schools connect with community partners through the CFK network.
Charter Schools
Charter schools throughout our service area are welcome in the network, whatever their authorizer.
Outside Our Service Area? Bring the Model to Your City
If your school is outside Jackson, Johnson, or Wyandotte county, you can still bring the CFK approach to your community through our Coaching & Training program.
- Virtual coaching sessions with a CFK coach, your principals, and district liaisons
- Onsite kickoffs and in-person training on the ground in your community
- Practical tools and resources, available across three program tiers
- Support built around the same 4-step process used across our Kansas City network
Every tier is built to fit your school’s needs. Learn more at the link below.
How a Partnership Comes Together
Every school partnership follows the same four steps, guided by our coaches from the first conversation on.
01
Engage
We connect with community organizations and get them ready to serve in schools.
02
Connect
We match those partners with your school and the goals you’ve set, and your CFK coach facilitates the introduction.
03
Launch
Your liaison and CFK coach kick off the partnership, and partners begin real projects tied to your goals.
04
Monitor & Grow
Your coach stays involved to make sure the partnership launches strong and sticks.
What Principals and Partners Say
Ask a principal what changes when the community shows up, and you hear the same answer: they stop feeling alone. Ask a partner, and you hear that they finally know their work is making a difference. Here is what that sounds like in their own words.
Frequently Asked Questions
It starts with your school’s goal. Say you want to raise attendance by 10%. Your community partners work with you to build real projects around that goal: an attendance party, attendance contracts, mentoring for chronically absent students, or incentives for students who show up consistently.
Whatever your school needs most. Partnerships are built around seven goal areas — Attendance, Achievement, Behavior, Social-Emotional, Belonging, Staff Satisfaction, and Family Engagement — so every project a partner takes on ties back to a goal you actually set, not a generic volunteer activity.
You can, and many schools already do plenty on their own. What we add is the network behind it: we recruit, vet, and coach community partners, then match them to the specific goals you set, so you’re not the one doing that outreach and coordination on top of everything else on your plate. A coach stays involved throughout the year to keep things on track.
Less than you’d think. Your school names one staff liaison — often a counselor or social worker — who works directly with your coach to run the partnership day to day. Partnerships typically kick off in August or September and run through the school year, with no separate scheduling to manage beyond that one point of contact.
Nothing. Joining our network is free. Some schools also choose our paid Coaching & Training program for more hands-on support, but that’s optional. The core partnership doesn’t cost your school anything.
Longer than most people expect. Five years is our minimum goal for a partnership, and many schools maintain their partner(s) well beyond that. Some of our schools have kept partners for over a decade!
We currently serve 7 school districts — Center, Grandview, Hickman Mills, KCK, KCPS, Raytown, and Shawnee Mission — and 7 charter schools across Jackson, Johnson, and Wyandotte counties.
Join a Lunch & Learn
We host regular Lunch & Learns for principals and school leaders who want to see how a partnership actually works. We cover Our proven 4-step process for community partnerships, what a partnership looks like day to day at your school, and how your staff liaison and our coach work together to reach the goals you set.
We finish with time for your questions, whether your school is brand new to this or you’ve worked with community partners for years and want to get more out of it.
Join our next Lunch & Learn to see how a partnership could work for your school.