Partnerships between governments, the civil society, and the private sector, have crucial role for achieving a sustainable society. As part of addressing the global environmental crisis the approach of sustainable development was established (Bonnett, 2013; Tilbury, 2010). Sustainable development includes three main components – ecological, economic and social (Tracey & Anne, 2008). While the ecological in the context of education is widely discussed (Berkowitz, Ford, & Brewer, 2005) the economic and social component and specifically, the role of community-school partnerships in achieving sustainable development is less considered (Uzzell, 1999). According to the 17^th United Nation Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), partnerships have crucial role for achieving a sustainable society (UN, 2015).

Education for sustainability (EfS) was developed as a major way to address the environmental crisis by engaging the community. EfS is a vision of education that seeks to empower people of ages and communities to assume responsibility for creating a sustainable future and development of environmental stewardship (Mckeown & Hopkins, 2003). Dobson (2007) and Berkowitz et al. (2005) emphasize that the major goal of EfS is develop individuals who act in a responsible way with respect to the environment. Dobson (2007) indicates the commitment of environmental citizens in protecting the common good such as the environment. Sustaining common good requires considering the social characteristics of the community involved in specific environment. Such social characteristics are included in the idea of social capital. Social capital refers to social characteristics such as social trust, social networks, and social norms (Putnam, 2001). Social capital and civil society are tightly interrelated concepts. According to Paffenholz and Spurk (2006), civil society is an arena in which people voluntarily involved in collective actions around shared interests, purposes and values. EfS, environmental citizenship, social capital, and civil society, are often separately discussed in the academia and independently investigated. This study connects between these typically separated arena.

Civil society is often considered to be a separate sector as part of the following sectors: the state, family and community, and business. Schools can be seen as intermediators between these four sectors. Establishment and promotion of school – state – family and community – civil society – business partnerships are rare in the education field. As a result, only few research studies focused on the characteristics and development of these collaborations as a whole (Epstein et al., 2018). Most studies in this field address the impact of school-family-community partnerships on academic achievement (Castro et al., 2015) than on school-community partnerships that promote the value of sustainability through EfS.

In this study we investigated the characteristics of partnerships between an Israeli elementary-school (‘River School’ – a pseudonym) and different actors in the community in the context of promoting EfS and social capital in a local community. More specifically, we asked how ‘River School’ state-family and community-civil society-business partnership advocates sustainability in the society to influence social-environmental issues in the local and national scales. The significance of this study is theoretical and practical. Theoretically, it connects conceptual frameworks from sustainability and EfS with the sociological theories of social capital, and civil society. In addition, this study sheds light on the inclusion of these frameworks into the practice of school partnerships to promote sustainability. Practically, this study contributes to our understanding of the characteristics of these unique partnership in general and in the context of EfS.

River School Characteristics River School is an elementary school located in central Israel. The school is located near a stream. The socio-demographic characteristics of students’ parents were middle-low to middle-high socio-economic status. The school attempted to influence the community regarding the environment to create a sustainable society and develop the social capital of its community. The school focused on education for sustainability and identified creating a sustainable local community as part of its humanistic, ecological, and citizenship oriented vision. The school was awarded a green school certificate in 2005 and received the continue green school certificate in 2009 (Ministry-of-Environmental-Protection, 2012). Since River School establishment, school partnerships were gradually developed. Research Methods We adopted a qualitative-interpretive approach to explore the participants' perspectives of the phenomenon (Merriam, 2002). Our data consisted of documents and interviews. The documents (several dozens) relate to the school's vision, experimentation, and green school certification, the dissemination center, committee meetings, sustainability events in the school and partnership with the community, the protocol of teacher's professional development programs, curriculum, and study units. We also conducted in-depth, semi-structure interviews (Seidman, 2012) with the principal who was chosen because of her two decades of experience as the driving force behind the development of EfS in the school. We interviewed the principal three times during this study. The interviews focused on her view of the connection between promoting sustainability in the school and forging partnerships with diverse actors in the community. For this study we employed the General Inductive Approach, typically focuses on the presentation and description of the main categories. In this approach the researcher uses straightforward set of procedure to follow such as preparation of raw data files (i.e. the interviews and the documents in our study); close reading of text; developing the main categories and revising them until deciding on the final ones (Thomas, 2006), until the two authors agreed on the final categories.

Our findings indicate that ‘River School’ succeded in partnership building through inviting the community to participate in school activities in the public shpere. In this way River School became a community center that enabled a development of an open dialogue between school and community concering mutual needs. Despite these successful partnership, our findings indicate that there are still some bounderies to broaden with respect to duration, scope and type of school connections with different actors, especially with the business sector. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that the partnerships enabled broadening environmental citizenship within schools and community. It seems that this attribute enabled the students to understand the importance of protecting the common good, such as protecting the local stream, and be involved in specific actions that required their personal effort for public benefit. The involvement of the students improved their understanding that environmental citizenship requires partnerships with different actors. The various partnerships provided the students the opportunity to interact with different policymakers in the public sphere as a common strategy in promoting sustainability. We also found that the activities of River School with the local community broaden the social capital of the local community. According to Putnam (2001) networking is one of the main characteristics of a developed social capital. The rich networks that River School succeeded to establish and maintain with the various actors (i.e. state, family and community, civil society, and business) enabled the increase of social capital. This study demonstrates how school could serve as an anchor for partnerships establishment with diverse actors in the society. Based on River School’s success in creating partnership that promote sustainability and strengthen the social capital, we suggest to other schools who are willing to promote sustainability to perceive the community as valuable partners in this process.

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