The Place and Power of Stakeholders

 

When was the last time you used the word “stakeholder” in the context of your school community? How about constituents? Partner? Client? Customer? (It gets worse from there.)  The purpose of these next few minutes is twofold: to ask you to lock on to the word “stakeholder” when you talk about your school community. to view your stakeholders as a basket of real people with real insight committed to the mission of your school.  Not surprisingly, “constituent” is a fair word if we hold to the strict definition of the dictionary, meaning, “a part of the whole or a component of something” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). That's who our people are. But the word “stakeholder” ups the ante.