Community turns out to support local farm, and other stories

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities, Safety

Community turns out to support local farm through lean year

Lincoln Journal – Raphaella Cruz – Laughter, bluegrass music and the sweet smell of flowers drifted across Blue Heron Organic Farm on Saturday during the farm’s Fall Festival and Fundraiser. Intermittently pouring and sprinkling rain didn’t seem to have any effect on visitors who picked bouquets of flowers in the labyrinth, joined the hayride around the fields, and shopped for fresh vegetables while mingling with friends and neighbors at the farm stand.

Single mom gets first Menlo Park Habitat for Humanity home

San Jose Mercury News – Jessica Bernstein-Wax – The families, who were all on a waiting list for low-income housing in Menlo Park, must put in 500 hours of labor, called sweat equity, in exchange for a zero-interest mortgage and no down payment on the properties. The initiative revitalizes rundown or abandoned buildings and makes home ownership possible for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to realize that dream, organizers say. “It’s about rebuilding the community — putting families back into the community and letting them grow,” VanHook said at the ceremony.

New arrival: community-supported kitchen

OregonLive.com – Ivy Manning – Just as we were getting acquainted with the idea of community-supported agriculture, or CSAs, a new alphabet soup of initials has cropped up in our locavore food scene: the CSK, or community-supported kitchen. “The idea is something like a CSA, but we go one step further and use local food to make nutrient-rich, prepared foods for those who want to eat well, but don’t have the time or know-how,” says Tressa Yellig, founder of 3-month-old Salt, Fire & Time CSK in the Buckman neighborhood.

Eighteen years later, Citizens on Patrol credited with reducing crime throughout Fort Worth

Fort Worth Star Telegram – Mike Lee – “Our crime has gone down significantly because of the amount of people patrolling,” she said. The first class of 105 COPs volunteers from 11 neighborhoods was trained in 1991. At the same time, police began focusing on community policing and assigned liaison officers known as neighborhood patrol officers to each part of town. By the mid-1990s, there were COPs programs in 120 neighborhoods; today 214 have them.

Touched by the Wayland Angels

Wayland Town Crier – Susan L. Wagner – In 2002, when Wayland’s Jean Seiden was being treated for breast cancer, her friends and neighbors set up a meal chain and delivered food to her home on a regular basis. Not long after, another town resident, Pam Washek, was found to have a tumor in her shoulder, and Seiden offered to set up a similar food chain for her family. Unfortunately, Seiden lost her battle three years ago at the age of 48. But the synergy between her and Washek still flourishes in the Wayland Angels, an organization the two women established to provide others with the same assistance they had received while undergoing their own cancer treatments.

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Community safety team members are looking out for criminals

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities, Safety

Community Safety teams gather in North Naples for a community cleanup. Haley Krantz a Jr at Gulf Coast HS volunteers at site. Photo Gary Jung

Community Safety teams gather in North Naples for a community cleanup. Haley Krantz a Jr at Gulf Coast HS volunteers at site. Photo Gary Jung

They have no badges, no guns, and no arrest powers.

But what they lack in law enforcement authority, they make up for in knowledge of their neighborhoods.

They are the members of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office community safety teams, and they have quietly become their neighborhoods’ watchdogs, identifying issues and raising concerns that don’t necessarily show up on the agency’s radar.

“They’re kind of our eyes and ears out there,” said Collier Sgt. Mike Raines, who works in Golden Gate.

It was April 2008, as the foreclosure crisis began ramping up, that then-Undersheriff Kevin Rambosk first proposed community safety teams — voluntary partnerships of residents, law enforcement officers, business owners and other civic leaders — to help deal with the increasing number of abandoned homes. But while cleaning up abandoned homes was the original intent, the teams now focus on a variety of quality of life issues.

“It’s a neighborhood watch program that’s kicked up a notch,” Raines said.

The Golden Gate district is leading the way with 18 safety teams, followed by the East Naples and North Naples districts with four each, and the Golden Gate Estates, Everglades and Immokalee districts, which each have one team so far, the Sheriff’s Office reported.

The Sheriff’s Office has a good grasp of crime in the different neighborhoods, analyzing crime trends from a variety of angles, North Naples Sgt. Jake Walker said. But sometimes it’s the smaller issues — broken windows, unkempt lawns, speeders — that most concern residents, and that deputies may not be aware of.

“We work to resolve those issues with the various stakeholders involved,” Walker said.

“We chose areas that don’t typically have strong homeowners associations for our first four teams,” Walker said.

Deputies began drumming up support for the safety teams by doing bicycle patrols, meeting with residents, and inviting them to a kick-off meeting, Walker said.

“It was a lot of brainstorming,” Martin Jelliffe, 63, who lives off Solana Road, said of the first meetings he attended. “What’s going on in your area? What would you like to see?”

After the first meeting, attendees were loaded into transport vans and driven around their neighborhood to point out concerns.

“It might be a drug house. It might be a house with juveniles that are unmanaged by their parents,” Walker said. “It might be foreclosed homes, abandoned homes, or homes with substantial code violations.”

Over the summer, the safety teams helped plan National Night Out events, and in early September, helped get the word out for community clean-ups, which took place Sept. 19.

Two large trash bins were set up in an empty lot at the intersection of El Rado Street and Alhambra Circle for the North Naples clean-up. People from around the neighborhood dropped off yard waste, old furniture, tires and plastic Christmas trees.

During monthly meetings, the members bring up new concerns, and the deputies discuss how previous concerns were resolved.

“Every month there is progress,” said Ann De Piero, a member of the Michigan Avenue team with her husband, Tony De Piero, 46.

“It’s the community kind of taking charge of their own neighborhoods,” Raines said. “It’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to cultivate all along.”

Read the full story: Watch out: Community safety team members are looking out for criminals » Naples Daily News. By Ryan Mills

Citizens propose anti-crime measures

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities, Safety

The president of the Tallahassee chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The Rev. Joseph T. Wright, sent four community officials a list of recommendations for how best to prevent and reduce crime in Tallahassee. Wright said he was part of a group of seven people who came up with recommendations as a result of an Aug. 24 meeting at Bethel Baptist Church. That meeting was called in response to two fatal shootings Aug. 20 at a city hotel.

The seven recommendations were mailed Tuesday to Tallahassee Police Chief Dennis Jones, Leon County Sheriff Larry Campbell, Leon County Schools Superintendent Jackie Pons, and County Commissioner Bill Proctor.

Commissioner Proctor’s office released a statement in response to the recommendations:

“The SCLC has brought forward a timely and interesting proposal for the leadership of our community to contemplate. It is time for policymakers to take seriously and give open consideration to this community request submitted to us now. I am ready to move forward and examine the possibilities of what we can do to reasonable address the concerns presented.”

Officer David McCranie, spokesman for the Tallahassee Police Department, said the recommendations represent the way communities solve problems — collectively. “These are very good ideas. We are not going to be able to solve crime by ourselves.”

Community Recommendations

  1. Creating a Safe City Strike Force of city police and code enforcement charged with confiscating properties seized in drug crimes and using the funds to provide housing for the homeless;
  2. Requesting that judges uphold the 10, 20, to Life Law without compromise;
  3. Appointing zone coordinators to community districts where block leaders can help to report suspicious activities;
  4. Establishing a 10 p.m. curfew for youth under 17 for three years and fining violators;
  5. Asking that the Leon County School District change its daily school schedule from 8:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
  6. Requiring all businesses close no later than 1 a.m.;
  7. Developing a buddy system for college students and an electronic safety device that students can use to contact law enforcement in emergency situations.

Read the full article: Citizens propose anti-crime measures | tallahassee.com | Tallahassee Democrat. By Davi Saez.

Meriden neighborhood associations thrive

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities, Safety

When the Action 13 neighborhood association held a meeting Thursday to provide information for residents looking to start local block watch programs, a crowd of 30 people came out to join the discussion.

Earlier this month, nearly 50 people attended the Dutch Hill association meeting to discuss quality-of-life issues and the largest annual event for the associations, the National Night Out program held at City Park in August, has drawn 3,000 people for two consecutive years.

Neighborhood associations in Meriden have been thriving in recent years, with participation increasing steadily since 2006 and groups, including West Siders, Action 13, City Park and Dutch Hill, have seen increasing numbers of regular attendees at their meetings.

Presidents of the local associations said a shift from crime to quality-of-life issues, such as keeping up good appearances and preventing kids from throwing parties on dead-end streets, focusing on children and a strong partnership with the Meriden Police Department and the police Neighborhood Initiatives Unit have led to the resurgence of these neighborhood associations. As they move toward the future, they said these factors will play a key role in the continued success of these associations.

Officer Fred Rivera, who works on patrol in both the Action 13 and West Sider neighborhoods, said it wasn’t always this way. Just a few years ago, many of the associations were struggling to maintain any regular membership.

“When I first came on to join the department seven years ago, there really weren’t many members and most of these groups weren’t even meeting regularly,” Rivera said. “Now every meeting you come to, neighbors are out and want to get involved.

Johnathon Henninger / Record-Journal Dave Swedock, president of the Council of Neighborhood, talks at a gathering at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Meriden Thursday night. Recent vandalism was discussed.

Johnathon Henninger / Record-Journal Dave Swedock, president of the Council of Neighborhood, talks at a gathering at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Meriden Thursday night. Recent vandalism was discussed.

Declines in participation

Standing on stage during the 2009 National Night Out event, overlooking a crowd that included nearly 3,000 people and more than 60 vendors from organizations across the community, Meriden Council of Neighborhoods president David Swedock couldn’t help but smile. Just five years ago, Swedock could only dream about having that sort of participation at any community event. By the summer of 2004, membership in neighborhood associations was so low that many of the neighborhoods did not host monthly meetings, had no real leadership and in some cases were in danger of going defunct.

Swedock said there were several reasons for the disconnect, but the toughest challenge was finding interested members when police were no longer involved. “Our main problem was the disbanding of the community policing unit in 2001,” Swedock said. “When the officers were no longer involved, it changed the way these associations were able to operate. Without police, these groups are nothing more than a social network.”

What had allowed the associations to thrive was the direct involvement of officers who were dedicated to their neighborhood communities, Swedock said. When the community policing division was cut in 2001, Swedock said that all nearly came to a screeching halt, but several dedicated officers helped keep the associations on life support, explained Swedock. Police officers, including Otero, Timothy Topulous and Michael Zakrzewski volunteered their own time to attend meetings and prevent the neighborhood associations from dying off completely.

The resurgence

When current Police Chief Jeffry Cossette took over, one of his first moves as chief was to work with union members and re-establish the community policing efforts with the new Neighborhood Initiatives Unit. With a strong line of communication re-established between the Police Department and local residents, the department was able to address the petty crimes and nuisances that mattered most to residents.

Meanwhile a move by several associations in 2006 and 2007 to address quality-of-life issues and not just crime has helped foster participation at regular meetings once again. Proactive functions and events help provide positive entertainment for today’s youth and sends a strong message to the community that there is a commitment to happy, healthy living. The associations are also giving informative presentations that can teach residents to protect themselves and their property or can introduce neighbors to the political candidates in their district, said Lisa DeDominicis, president of Action 13.

As associations move to the future, City Park association president Ethel McQuiller said attracting regular participants remains a top priority and said participation is critical in allowing these types of organizations to host annual events. In areas such as Lewis Avenue, associations have also combined efforts to deal with lower participation often triggered by resident turnover when short-term renters move out. By pairing with the Kensington area and Grove Street associations, Swedock said the Lewis Avenue association has maintained active participation.

All of the neighborhood groups have also come together to form the Meriden Council of Neighborhoods, a nonprofit group comprised of members of neighborhood associations throughout the community. Swedock said this collaboration has allowed for funding to support events that would improve quality of life, including National Night Out.

Read the full article: www.MyRecordJournal.com – Meriden neighborhood associations thrive. Jason R. Vallee, Record-Journal staff

Meals unite Claremont neighborhood

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities, Safety

All it took to rally the neighbors was a little prime rib and an invitation.

“I know how easy it is to make friends when you’re a chef,” Crocker said with a chuckle. “So when I moved to Claremont, I thought I would combine both. I bought the largest prime rib I could find, put out fliers inviting people who lived around me to come and eat and waited. I thought I might have a lot of food to eat, but 40 people came, and the only thing on the agenda was to get to know each other.”

The spontaneous dinner invite led to driveway parties, where one person or family was asked to serve as host and people were encouraged to attend and to help out.

Little by little, the neighborhood got a bit bigger, as the neighborliness started extending farther down the street.

As people sat and ate, they started talking.

“We started sharing honest communications with each other. Then we started finding out that a truck had been broken into twice. Then we found out other families had had their cars broken into. My car was broken into twice. And a house had been burglarized during the day,” she said.

“I got mad. This was destroying my dream. I said, ‘I think we can handle this craziness,”‘ she said.

So she decided to talk to Claremont police Capt. Gary Jenkins about ways to protect her turf – from Mountain Avenue to Indian Hill Boulevard and north of Baseline Road to the Thompson Trail – which amounts to about 400 homes. Jenkins was more than enthusiastic.

claremont

Again, Crocker put the call out and 200 people attended a meeting with the Police Department. She collected e-mail addresses of the attendees.

“And I found out we now had an electronic communications board to use,” she said.

The concern and interest shown at the meeting resulted in the placement of 30 new Neighborhood Watch signs in the area.

“First, we wanted to get educated, and we did that. Then, we wanted to make sure our community continued,” she said.

The once loosely connected collection of homes now is a strongly forged neighborhood. The fall gathering is now a tradition.

Suzanne Sproul, Staff Writer. Read the full article: Meals unite Claremont neighborhood – DailyBulletin.com