United We Stand for Community Safety

Community Safety

South LA

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

Community Safety is an essential aspect of constituents' environments which impacts their overall mental and physical health in a negative manner. The improvement of community safety can help remediate some of these outcomes, and even prove to be beneficial in improving quality of life for the inhabitants of our marginalized black and brown communities. Community safety is having accessible streets and curbs, removal of graffiti to improve community presence, and clean accessible green spaces. Individuals within neighborhoods lacking community safety often exhibit symptoms such as stress, depression, and anxiety. These negative side effects can be remediated through community presence and involvement. Active engagement in community cleanup activities, educational community events, and coalition building activities help to create this sense of community. The outcome of the supplementation to this deficit of community safety results in a resilient thriving community empowered by change.

Our community safety initiative aims to lessen the byproduct of neighborhoods lacking community safety within our marginalized BIPOC communities and overall supplement the identified deficits within our communities. The initiative is composed of three main projects that we are planning to provide, the first being our 311 campaign which consists of distribution of information regarding free city services such as bulky item pick ups, fixing of non functioning street lights, sidewalk repairs, and much more. We will also be conducting monthly community clean ups, as a part of this 311 campaign, where we identify an area in need of this cleanup service. In our cleanups we gather volunteers from the community who are interested in participating, following our outlined plan, and after congregating for a community brunch where we continue the conversation about focus areas, needs in the community, or simply serve as a healing circle. Our second project is providing programs in a safe community environment for all ages which will consist of aerobic activities such as Yoga, Zumba, and similar exercises. Having these outlets for individuals to express themselves in a safe space promotes mental health, physical health, and an overall sense of community. The third project consists of green space beautification, whether it be in front of someone's home or the local park. Improved public spaces can help deter crime as well as promoting mental health and increasing mobility and access.

In our area of service being South Los Angeles we hope to create a positive impact on our historically marginalized communities, reducing the amount of factors contributing to negative consequences on a mental and physical level. Through our community safety initiative we are applying a holistic approach in efforts to combat the current deficits within the community, all while creating a coalition of interested individuals which will continue to outlive the span of this grant. Specifically within our short term goal we hope to conduct a total of 7 community cleanups, beautifying 4 alley ways, conduct a total of 12 311 campaign information distribution events, and providing at least 2 aerobic programs in safe community spaces. Our long term goals for this project would be to improve the quality of life through community beautification, distribution of information that can be used beyond the end our this grant so that individuals can continue this work of community advocacy on their own.

Within our initiative there are projects that have been implemented for a few years such as the community cleanups, community beautification and health programs like yoga and Zumba, where as projects like our 311 information distribution events are something that is relatively new to our programming. As far as our previously implemented projects we have measured our success through the narratives of those constituents whose communities we serve. Our monthly community meetings are a dedicated space for the conversations of the impact we are creating within out target communities. We are in the process of creating surveys that will be able to measure the satisfaction of the communities served as well as individuals having participated in our projects. With this survey we hope to project more quantitive information as most of the impact has been measured by qualitative data, through experiences and narratives of those directly affected by our projects.