The Cambridge Families Action Network (CFAN) was started during the 2024–2025 school year after families at Peabody Elementary recognized a significant gap between the values publicly espoused by the Friends of Peabody and the experiences of many families within the school community.
The Friends of Peabody states:
“We believe in relationship building, amplifying unheard voices, community learning and self-reflection. We are dedicated to ridding our community of ableism, classism, homophobia, nativism, racism, sexism, transphobia and all other forms of bias and bigotry.”
Yet, nearly two years later, families continued to experience a disconnect between these stated values and actual practices.
Despite CFAN’s efforts to build relationships and engage with the broader school community, the organization did not amplify our voices or consistently help share opportunities with families beyond its existing network. When we asked for our community events to be shared through their social media channels, an especially straightforward way to amplify the voices of families who were not already part of their established network the response was particularly telling: rather than using its platform to help amplify our events, the organization ultimately deleted its social media presence.
That decision is difficult to reconcile with a stated commitment to “amplifying unheard voices.”
The issue is not that Friends of Peabody was obligated to promote every event or organization. The issue is the broader pattern: an organization that publicly identifies amplifying unheard voices as one of its core commitments should be willing to examine whose voices it actually amplifies, whose events and opportunities it makes visible, and which families remain outside those networks.
For CFAN, this experience reinforced why an independent family organization was necessary.
Two years of organizing demonstrated that the problem was not simply that marginalized families needed to speak louder or participate more. The problem was that the existing structures were not consistently creating space for those families to be heard in the first place.
CFAN therefore became a space for families to do what the existing structures were not adequately doing: organize across differences, share resources, communicate directly with families, provide mutual aid, and ensure that families who might otherwise be overlooked could build their own networks and platforms.
Ultimately, there is a fundamental difference between saying that unheard voices matter and actually making room for those voices. Inclusion cannot be measured solely by the language an organization or school uses to describe itself. It has to be measured by who is invited in, who is listened to, whose information is shared, whose events are promoted, whose concerns receive attention, and who has influence within the community.
Cambridge Students for Justice 