The bourgeoning scholarship on community organizing for educational change suggest positives outcomes when it comes to countering failed school reforms. Early reports on community organizing across the United States have shown an exponential grow since the 1990s and by 2010 there were 500 of 800 community organizing groups were working in the area of school reform. Nevertheless, not all organizing efforts are the same as they are contingent to context, organizational characteristics, phase of organizing, levels of work (i.e. neighborhood, school district, and state). The purpose of this dissertation was to bring front and center the stories of the community leadership from Grupo de las Ocho Comunidades del Caño Martín Peña (G-8, Inc) around their experiences during an educational project that started as a collaborative agreement with the centralized Department of Education of Puerto Rico. Through the interviews and document analysis I present how the G-8’s leadership turned to their apoderamiento comunitario and sentido de pertenencia to implement a curriculum in an elementary school focus on social transformation designed with the participation of residents and community leadership. Following a decolonial stance, I underlined the instances where the community engaged in what I saw as a decolonial act or when there was a manifestation of the logics of coloniality during the emergent collaboration.For G-8’s leadership it was important to organized in order to challenge the historical government neglect towards el Caño that was used as a subterfuge to forced them out of their communities. This historical abandonment towards el Caño was also seen in the pobre educación young people were receiving. Thus, transformar la educación and community-school relationship was also part of their comprehensive plan to transform el Caño. To accomplished this goal, G-8 establish an agreement of collaboration to implement a curriculum in leadership and social transformation build upon the political education of their community organizing work. Thus, the main question in this dissertation is: How has the G8-DEPR collaboration emerged and evolved in the context of the development and implementation of an innovative educational project? The collaborative agreement evolved in a contentious relationship in which the central and the local school leadership joined forces to impeded the full implementation of the curriculum. The educational project for La Escuela de Liderazgo y Transformación Social del Caño Martín Peña geared towards reconfiguring the community’s place inherent in state sanctioned schooling by centering la comunidad and their lucha comunitaria in regards school-community relations. For DEPR leadership the new educational project was both a signal to communities to work together with the centralized system and also a political project that did not align with the ideological and colonial form of state-sanctioned schooling. Thus, the tensions around the curriculum content and its implementation between the colonial DEPR and the G-8’s leadership denotes how forms of community-school collaboration that are institutionalized hinder the transformative work of CBOs. Moreover, the politics of coloniality deemed community knowledge as no important to contribute in bringing educational change will make the collaboration not viable. This was the case of the G8-DEPR’s collaboration. The community leadership took the hard decision to retire from the collaboration and find other ways to have their educational project for La Escuela de Liderazgo y Transformación Social del Caño Martín Peña.
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