CADRE - Community Asset Development Re-defining Education

Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE) is an independent, community-based, organizing, and social justice-driven parent membership organization in South Los Angeles founded in 2001. CADRE is led by Black/African American and Latino parents and caregivers whose children attend local schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). We build power to win systemic change – through new policies and challenging existing ones as part of a movement towards educational and racial justice.

Our mission is to solidify and advance parent leadership to ensure that all children are rightfully educated regardless of where they live. CADRE challenges schools’ beliefs and practices that criminalize children and parents and violate their human rights to a quality education, dignity, and participation in our current public education system.

We reach for our mission through parent organizing. For CADRE, parent organizing includes: building a membership base and core leaders; leadership development and capacity building; political education; an on-going systemic change campaign based on parent monitoring and holding schools accountable for human and civil rights; participatory action research; individual advocacy; working in coalitions and building a movement; and last but not least, healing, transformation, and building collective solidarity among parents. All of this is done with the deep participation of our parent leaders through the centering of their lives as parents of color, raising families of color, in historically disenfranchised South LA.

We have matured from our South LA living-room roots to become a trusted parent organization locally, statewide, and nationally. Through our Human Right to Education Campaign, CADRE has won policy changes in 2007, 2013, and 2014 that have led to historic reductions in suspensions in LAUSD and to new approaches to positive, restorative school discipline and climate. CADRE also co-founded the national Dignity in Schools Campaign, along with its Los Angeles and California-based chapters.

Our vision is that schools will respect and cultivate the humanity, collective spirit, and resilience of Black and Latino families, and contribute to a shared vision of South LA as a unified community that has power and self-determination.