A necessary move to dismantle educational injustice for historically marginalized populations is to create equitable family--school partnerships built on trusting relationships. Inequitable practices and implicit norms and biases must be intentionally counteracted to establish trusting relationships. The meeting protocol described in this article, RAFT, was born through community-based participatory action research to instigate and provide time for structured, student-centered conversations to build relationships between families with refugee backgrounds and their children's teachers. This article describes the qualitative pilot study and the community-based iterative process for designing RAFT. All 12 families and 16 school professionals who implemented RAFT expressed satisfaction with it, and teachers without exception expressed eagerness to implement RAFT with more regularity and with more participants. Themes that emerged include: (a) the importance of focusing on the child/student and the care and commitment expressed by taking the time to focus on developing a relationship between educators and families; (b) the flexibility and freedom of RAFT not being tied to required parent-teacher conferences which have a rushed timeframe and set location; (c) the increased appreciation and knowledge of the student and each other, paving the way for further collaboration; and (d) the effectiveness of elements drawn from restorative practices. We include implications for practice and further research, including measuring RAFT's outcomes and scaling up its use to determine its effectiveness.