Welcome to PhillyParents.org

Social Capital can be defined as the level of collaboration and trust within a community. It can best be illustrated in an allegory to the old cliche “it isn’t WHAT you know but WHO you know”. Despite numerous studies (particularly over the past 20 years) demonstrating that social capital may be a significant factor in influencing the success of the individual, our social institutions have largely remained unchanged and continue to provide resources to the individual instead of finding ways of increasing trust and collaboration within the community as a whole.

PhillyParents.org believes that the road to true economic freedom has never been about the empowerment of the individual, but is about the collaboration of the village. We know that the empowerment of the individual, when it occasionally succeeds, simply results in that individual leaving our community. We also know that, when it often fails, it results in individuals forever being dependent on those institutions. It’s time to recognize the success of countless waves of immigrants who relied on each other rather than on outside support for their success. It’s finally time to actually believe and act on the old adage “it takes a village””.

PhillyParents.org is a place where parents can get information from other parents. It is the brainchild of Jay Cohen who has been a public school parent, an employee of the School District of Philadelphia and a educational consultant.

This site is built using technology developed by EcSoTech - Jay's technology development organization specializing in Google Drive, GMail, Calendar and Groups scripting. While the site has been around for many years as a place for parents to share information, this new version of the site (with its focus on EcSoTech Community Collaboration tools) is just being added for the first time during the summer of 2016. The goal of EcSoTech is to build many more community collaboration tools in the future. Please check out the site and let Jay at jay@weisscohen.org know what you think. To view Jay's CV, click here