Community Building Through Community Partners
As part of the Safe & Sound crime reduction strategy, the Community Partners Program contributes to stakeholder capacity building, collaboration, and action beginning with individuals seeking neighborhood change. Organizers visit one porch at a time, listening to what residents have to say about their neighborhood. What are the issues? What are the assets? Who do you know? What do you know? Questions are geared towards quickly identifying how residents perceive and react to the crime concerns, nuisance properties and issues of blight in their neighborhood. The Community Partners program is focused on building community and sustainable neighborhood change by using resident concerns with crime and blight. These issues are typically viewed as deficits or negatives. But they can also be used as community building assets which bring people together around a common cause to inspire and develop neighborhood based leadership.
Community building strategies do more than just remediate the immediate problem. Community building connects people with people; not people with services or institutions. This enables greater learning and leveraging of resources like law enforcement and city service as well as more personalized referrals to employment and social services. Ultimately, community building seeks to change the relationship of residents and resources to one of empowerment.
We emphasize building human capital, which is supported by our direct services, including law enforcement, youth development, resource connections, training and networking. Community Partners are improving outcomes for individuals and families through outreach and needs assessment, problem solving, referrals, and follow-up. We build stakeholder capacity by offering services, training, organizing functions and resources.
We emphasize building neighborhood capital, improving the physical landscape of the neighborhood, which is carried out by housing and blight reduction activities, nuisance property abatement, and effective relationships with enforcement services. Moreover, we are using community service as a vehicle to bring residents, youth and law enforcement together to work on tangible community improvement activities that build community.
We emphasize building social capital, strengthening what is called civic life, social fabric, sense of community and the like, which is accomplished by local block watches, block clubs, landlord groups, youth leadership groups and collaborations with religious, civic, and community organizations and other organizers. Safe & Sound is constantly responding through outreach, meetings, activities and networking.
The Safe & Sound strategy is more and more focused on community building by strengthening the capacity of neighborhood residents, block clubs and city services. This change is based in neighborhood concerns and priorities but incorporates resources and services from outside of the neighborhood. Over time a transforming of the relationship with the systems outside the neighborhood, such as law enforcement, youth services and city services can occur. Through community building strategies, Safe & Sound is fostering a fundamental transformation in high-crime/low-income neighborhoods that changes the circumstances of families and neighborhoods for the long term.
