Building the Architecture for Authentic Community Engagement: A Practical Guide for International Schools
An interview with Aaron Moniz, Co-Founder of Inspire Citizens, including helpful resources
In this second feature in a multi-part series, Aaron Moniz, Co-Founder of Inspire Citizens, shares timely insights to inspire thinking around the IB Middle Years Programme’s shift from Service as Action to Community Engagement. Educators beyond the MYP will also find these concepts helpful as they seek to move their own school communities forward toward more authentic community engagement.
SFS and community partners gather to celebrate the Chuseok Songpyeon Making Volunteer Event, a partnership with local government officials and the Sunshine Organization. This collaboration, facilitated by Jean Kim from Christian Ministries and Mrs. Hong from the Seodemun-gu district office, represents the breakthrough in community engagement that has transformed elementary learning at the school.
Building the Architecture for Authentic Community Engagement: A Practical Guide for Progressive Schools
As international schools navigate the shift from traditional service models to authentic community engagement, the question isn't whether to make this transition, it's how. In a recent conversation, Aaron Moniz, co-founder of Inspire Citizens, offers concrete strategies for schools ready to move beyond performative service toward transformative partnerships that benefit both students and communities.
"The biggest stumbling block is that schools often want to jump straight to action without building the necessary infrastructure," Aaron explains. His team's work with international schools across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas has revealed a consistent pattern: sustainable community engagement requires intentional scaffolding before any student steps foot in the community.
Essential Scaffolding: The Foundation for Success
Before exploring specific strategies, Aaron emphasizes four critical elements that schools must establish. "Think of these as your load-bearing walls," he suggests. "Without them, even the best intentions will collapse under the weight of reality."
Time Architecture stands as the first pillar. "If you're serious about community engagement, it needs dedicated space in the schedule," Aaron states. This isn't about finding spare moments between academic blocks but rather creating protected time where relationships can develop and reflection can deepen. Schools need to restructure their weekly schedules to include dedicated blocks specifically for community engagement work, whether that is advisory periods, Wednesday afternoons, or integrated units within the curriculum.
Community Partner Networks form the second essential element. Aaron describes watching schools struggle when they treat partnerships as transactional relationships. "You need what we call a community assets map rather than a list of organizations that need help. This is a network of reciprocal relationships where both parties see genuine value." He shares his experience with Seoul Foreign School, where he witnessed school champions deepen their relationships with the Ministry of Education and Government Welfare Office to help establish a common vision. "This is not volunteering,” Aaron insists. “This is multiple engagement, long-term student agency involved in discovering challenges and working together where we learn from one another."
The third pre-engagement component, Perceptual Communities, represents a shift in how schools group participants. "Rather than random advisory groups or grade-level divisions, consider grouping students and educator advisors around shared interests or causes they care about," Aaron suggests. These communities, whether focused on environmental justice, refugee support, or elderly care, create natural affinity groups where passion drives engagement. This approach allows students to self-select into impact communities that can persist across multiple years. On a practical level, it also identifies constituent groupings to facilitate scheduling and communication.
Finally, addressing People and Resource Development ensures sustainability. "You can't expect teachers who've been running traditional service programs to suddenly become community engagement experts," Aaron notes. This requires professional development, but also strategic resource allocation, from transportation budgets to partnership coordination roles.
Transforming Advisory: From Check-ins to Change-making
With scaffolding in place, Aaron turns to practical implementation, beginning with advisory programs, which are a common feature in international schools and represent an element that is primed for transformation. "Advisory is a space where community engagement can take flight," he observes. "It's either seen as sacred time for building these capacities, or it becomes a dumping ground for administrative tasks."
The Inspire Citizens’ Empathy to Impact Framework provides a natural structure for advisory-based community engagement. During the Care phase, advisories explore domains of significance. Aaron describes how advisory groups might spend their first sessions examining social justice standards, challenges of belonging, well-being issues, or environmental sustainability through local lenses. Aaron insists that this phase is rich in opportunities to bond groups as they set their ‘why statements’ and find unity in embracing an opportunity they collectively believe in.
Moving into Aware, students conduct authentic investigations. "This isn't googling statistics," Aaron clarifies. "It's interviewing community members, observing systems, and understanding root causes." He emphasizes how students investigating food insecurity might spend time visiting local food banks, interviewing both volunteers and recipients, and mapping the complex web of causes behind hunger in their communities. Aaron’s experiences lead him to suggest three or four sessions be allocated to this important stage.
The Able phase sees advisories building necessary competencies. "If students are going to engage with refugee communities, they need intercultural communication skills. If they're addressing environmental issues, they need to understand systems thinking," Aaron explains. This skill-building happens organically within the advisory structure, with teachers facilitating workshops, bringing in expert speakers, or connecting with other advisory teams developing complementary capacities.
Aaron points out that this stage is clearly where students prepare for action by planning their lessons and activities, acquiring resources and materials, practicing before engaging on-site, setting up roles and responsibilities, and reviewing project management timelines. “Taking the time for teachers and students to intentionally link to a school’s advisory standards or external guidance such as ISCA standards,” Aaron adds, “can really help everyone to apply their skills meaningfully in authentic community engagement settings.
Finally, Taking Action moves beyond one-off events. Aaron mentions having documented examples from schools like Lincoln School showcasing sustained partnerships. "Advisory groups can partner with local schools for entire academic years—starting by learning the local language, then co-teaching lessons, eventually co-designing community gardens that both schools maintain. These relationships can continue for years."
Intentionally addressing the overarching sustainability of community engagement initiatives, Aaron emphasises the opportunity that is embodied by reciprocal partnerships. “We need to take action, reflect, practice and improve based on partner feedback and that's what makes it sustained and meaningful,” he says.
Taking Community Engagement to a new level in PE: Sharing a First-Aid and CPR workshop offered points of interaction that served to deepen friendships and cultural understanding at Lincoln School in Buenos Aires. (image supplied)
And, most importantly, as the end of a semester or academic year approaches, we must consider vital communication objectives in order to avoid inadvertently cooling community partner relationships. “As educators, it falls to us to work with our students so that we don't just leave a partner hanging over summer break,” Aaron adds. “We always need to devote a few sessions to closing our relationships, using evidence of growth to see if we met our goals and even sending personal notes and thank you cards for the partnerships and friendships we've developed.” Proper closure ensures that partners each have what they need to sustain the work and relationship over a break or, in some cases, making sure there is clarity that the collaboration is moving into a different stage, specifically further stage of evolution or a final conclusion.
Measuring the Impact on our Learners: When is the best time for reflection?
Leaning into the structured approach of the Empathy to Impact Framework or one’s chosen conceptual approach, the integration of reflection opportunities at every major stage is the key to monitoring alignment with desired learning outcomes, Aaron insists. The new explicit MYP Learning outcomes with respect to community engagement have much to offer even non-MYP schools. The list reads like a roadmap to developing a more empowered learner: the improvement of skills, the development of initiative, providing evidence of commitment and demonstrating collaboration. “I’m always amazed at the variety of reflection opportunities that educators devise for checking in at the end of each chunk,” explains Aaron. “The best ones are not heavily text-based but instead are engaging and fun.” Aaron lists video diaries, audio notes, mind maps, exit tickets, cartoon sketches and systems webs as just a few examples of data that can be collected throughout the student’s journey to show their growth in global citizenship.
Curricular Integration: Where Learning Meets Impact
While advisory provides one pathway, Aaron argues that the most powerful community engagement happens when it's woven into the curriculum itself. "This isn't about adding community engagement on top of existing units," he emphasizes. "It's about recognizing that authentic community connections can actually drive deeper academic learning."
In science classes, the framework translates naturally. Aaron describes how biology units studying ecosystems can partner with local conservation groups (see this exemplary story from AES in New Delhi). The Care phase sees students exploring biodiversity loss as their domain. During Aware, they conduct field research in nearby forests, collecting data on indigenous plant species. The Able phase involves learning scientific classification and documentation methods. Their Taking Action might result in published field guides now used by local schools and conservation groups.
Even language arts find natural connections. Aaron describes powerful units where English students studying narrative writing partner with elderly care centers. "Students can become biographers, capturing life stories of elderly residents. The writing skills they develop are phenomenal because the audience is real, the purpose is authentic." The resulting anthologies can be published and distributed to families, creating lasting artifacts of community memory.
Applying authentic community engagement principles to Physical Education yields equally powerful educational outcomes, as the PE team at Lincoln School in Buenos Aires experienced over the recent months. This refreshed approach is making positive waves within the school and partner communities.
Social studies provides perhaps the most obvious integration points. "When you're studying migration, partner with refugee organizations or seek out stories and connections within your own international school or third culture community. When examining economic systems, work with social enterprises," Aaron suggests. He emphasizes that these partnerships shouldn't feel forced but should emerge naturally from curriculum goals. Units on urbanization can evolve into year-long partnerships with city planners, with students presenting recommendations that actually get incorporated into neighborhood development plans.
A key strategy in the development of stronger curricular service learning outcomes for Colegio Jorge Washington (COJOWA) has been to lean into networks that organically emerge from their closely connected partner, la Fundación COJOWA. (image supplied)
The Path Forward: From Theory to Practice
As schools contemplate this shift, Aaron offers pragmatic advice: "Invest the time, talent and energy. And make the commitment. Start small but think systemically. Pick one advisory, one curricular unit, and do it really well. Document everything. Share the stories. Build from success."
He acknowledges the challenges, including but not limited to institutional inertia, packed curricula and assessment pressures, but remains optimistic. "Schools that make this shift report transformed culture, increased student engagement, and perhaps surprisingly, improved academic outcomes. When learning has an authentic purpose, everything else tends to fall into place."
The transition from service to community engagement isn't merely semantic; it represents a fundamental reframing of how schools connect with communities. As Aaron concludes, "We're not preparing students for future civic engagement. Through these approaches, they're engaging as citizens right now, making a real impact while developing competencies that will serve them, and their communities, for life."
For schools ready to begin this journey, the message is clear: build the scaffolding, start with existing structures like advisory, integrate authentically into curriculum, and trust that meaningful engagement will follow. The communities, both within and beyond school walls, are waiting.
Curious to see what an all-school approach looks like?
This feature explores the perspective of COJOWA’s Community Engagement Co-ordinator
Explore more resources on implementing the Empathy to Impact framework and developing community engagement strategies: