Community Building
New Initiatives:
Lights On, Crime Off Campaign
CBA and Lowell’s Neighborhood Groups have embarked on a city-wide neighborhood safety campaign, called Lights On, Crime Off, to take a pro-active approach to addressing concerns of neighborhood safety, by focusing on crime prevention. Our primary goal is to lighten up high crime areas to help make residents feel safer. Since crime often happens under the hood of darkness, our secondary goal is to lower the incidences of crime by decreasing the number of dark streets and alleyways in high crime areas.
Our campaign first started out collecting pledges from residents and business owners to keep their lights on overnight. Since the campaign started in June, 2011, CBA was awarded a Community Building and Organizing Impact Grant from NeighborWorks for $10, 000 to continue the Lights On Campaign, and Keith Vallaincourt, a graduate student from UMASS Lowell, began volunteering with CBA using his GIS skills. With these two resources we are making maps to measure the campaign impact, creating before and after pictures of how lighting on the streets with the highest crime in Lowell changes over time and as a result of the Lights On campaign.
Using the City's on-line CRIMEMAPPING resource, we identified the top 10 streets with the highest incidences of crime, which are concentrated in the Acre, Lower Highlands and Centraville neighborhoods. Targetting these 10 streets and in partnership with the neighborhood groups of the forementioned neighborhoods, we are identifying parcel by parcel, where lights can be turned on and then reaching out to residents, landlords and businesses to do their part to help keep the streets well lit. We will also be indentifying street lights that need to be repaired and reporting outages through the City of Lowell's on-line process to report a street light outage.
Thanks to Next Step Living for their donation of energy efficient light bulbs, we are able to give residents we speak with a light bulb as a way of saying thank you for supporting the Lights On campaign. We are also sharing with residents information about the free Mass Save home energy assessments that Next Step Living can provide to residents.
Please contact Robyn at 978-452-7523 x809 if you would like to learn more about how to get involved in this campaign or support your local neighborhood group.
Monthly Potlucks
It is the connections and relationships we have with other people that make our experiences with organizations rich and meaningful, yet so often we are not given the opportunity to build those relationships. These Monthly Potlucks, held the last Thursday of each month, have food to share, people to socialize with, and a hot topic of discussion! Bring your favorite dish, or just something quick and easy. Meet and mingle with CBA staff, CBA members, and other leaders and residents from Lowell. This is also an opportunity for service providers to promote their programs in a very unique way. For more information, contact Robyn Long-Navas at robyn.long.navas@cbacre.org or 978-452-7523 x809.
Neighborhood News:
The Acre Neighborhood Group
Acre residents have a voice in the city with the creation last Spring of an Acre neighborhood group, ACTION (Acre Committee to Improve Our Neighborhood). The group works with the city, UMass Lowell, other neighborhood groups, and other organizations to represent the Acre’s interests and advocate for its residents and businesses. ACTION Chairman Dave Ouellette, a lifelong Acre resident and President of Passe Temps Club in the Acre for 26 years, helped form the group after being elected to the CBA board last year. As he began working with CBA, it became apparent to him that although CBA had in the past been called on to speak for resident issues, a resident lead group rather than a Community Development Corporation (CDC) would more effectively serve that role. CBA Executive Director Emily Weitzman Rosenbaum said she is very proud that Dave Ouellette’s association with CBA spurred him to take a leadership role in forming the group. “Empowering residents is an important part of our mission at CBA,” she said. “CBA provides opportunities and training for residents because they are uniquely positioned to build a positive future for their neighborhood and the city.” ACTION meetings are the third Wednesday of each month at 6:00 pm at the Passe Temps Club at 371 Moody Street.
Drawing Democracy Project
CBA in partnerhip with CMAA, received a grant from Access Strategies Fund to participate in the Drawing Democracy Project along with organizations all around the state. The Project had two components, educate local residents as to the redistricing process and participate in a group statewide effort to redraw the districts to create "Unity Maps." CBA and CMAA trained an educated hundreds of local residents on the state redistricting process. We then brought a group of 80 to the regional redistricting hearing in Lawrence, MA who called on those redrawing the legislative maps to “keep the 5th district intact”. CBA and CMAA staff and members also attended the Access Strategies press conference and Boston public hearing on July 11, 2011. Suzanne Frechette, CBA Deputy Director, spoke at the press conference as to the process that the grantees went through in creating the Unity Maps for the Congressional seats. The group then attended the hearing to support the unveiling of the unity maps to the Legislative Committee. . Both maps suggested kept the 5th District largely intact, with one version containing more central Ma communities and the other version having more communities south of the current district. Both CBA and CMAA were pleased because the maps were still primarily Lowell and Lawrence centered as we had requested.
