Save Crime Prevention Ottawa
Abid Jan, Ottawa Citizen December 30, 2009
Community development can be like the work of physicians and nurses. Like a health professional, you don’t cry when see your patients in agony and listen to their painful stories. However, the situation in some neighbourhoods in Ottawa had deteriorated to the extent that the stories of some the residents made me cry for the first time ever in my long community development career.
It was 2004 when I was assigned to work on a United Way-funded capacity building project. I had to engage 20 community leaders from five neighbourhoods in southeast Ottawa. The task became daunting for me when I learned that no community members were willing to participate.
A woman from Rwanda broke into tears while describing the fear, threats and intimidation in her Russell Heights neighbourhood, saying that she felt more unsafe than she did in Rwanda. Another woman said she couldn’t go to sleep after seeing older youths forcing younger youths to do drugs in the bushes behind her house. Residents were too scared to participate in the social service programs and civic engagement opportunities. A thorough review of various community development initiatives from around the world led me to reintroduce the very fundamental principles of community development: Co-ordination, collaboration, community participation and leveraging of resources. However, to translate these principles into practice, we needed a process to help us transform their cliché status into a living reality.
We would be required to organize, communicate, assess, work and celebrate, and continue to process. So, the fundamental principles and process were packaged as No Community Left Behind (NCLB), and shared with the concerned stakeholders later in 2004. The National Crime Prevention Centre (NCPC) appreciated the NCLB approach and funded a pilot initiative in the Ledbury-Banff neighbourhood, where we witnessed a remarkable transformation by the summer of 2006.
Then it was time to scale up the NCLB approach to other neighbourhoods with similar issues that directly and indirectly impacted each other. But at this critical time, the National Crime Prevention Centre dropped the ball; a funding policy change meant we wouldn’t be able to continue working in Ledbury-Banff, let alone replicate the initiative to other neighbourhoods. So Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) came to the rescue. Without the support of CPO in 2006 and subsequent years, we would not have been able to continue engaging residents who previously had been so reluctant to participate in any social activity.
One of the most successful components supported by CPO has been the establishment of youth councils in the four neighbourhoods where the program was active. One great success was the work of these youth councils on a photo voice project, funded by CPO, in which digital cameras were provided youths to document what was was happening in their neighbourhood. It was so successful that 14 community health and resource centres in Ottawa replicated it citywide in collaboration with the University of Ottawa. CPO has also been credited with making major strides in improving safety in Vanier, producing a major turnaround in that neighbourhood.
The No Community Left Behind approach to engaging neighbourhoods is part of the City of Ottawa’s Community Development Framework (CDF). The CDF brings together residents, service providers, agencies, researchers and funders to build on the neighbourhoods’ strengths. The community centres working on the CDF community engagement component now take a huge load off CPO’s shoulders. But Crime Prevention Ottawa still has a critical role to play. It can invest strategically in planning a system-level response to community needs, while the CDF takes on the direct community mobilization efforts.
We now had an opportunity for CPO to align its work with the new CDF and strategically implement its youth gang prevention strategy. However, unfortunately, it seems the City Council is about to pull the plug on CPO and undo it at a time when it could start playing a more strategic role. On Nov. 27, the city’s budget committee voted to eliminate Crime Prevention Ottawa in the 2010 budget. The motion to cut CPO was part of an omnibus motion to reduce overall city spending by $58 million, of which the CPO funding is a mere $500,000.
It seems counterproductive to put CPO on the chopping block at this time. It helped us survive at one point by bringing hope to the most marginalized and at-risk communities, and it could play an even more crucial role in the unfolding phases of the CDF. Ottawa’s troubled neighbourhoods have begun to thrive with the help of CPO.
According to surveys, the feeling of safety in some communities went up from 26 per cent to 68 per cent in three years. Community members who couldn’t sleep a few years ago due to flashbacks of what they witnessed during the day now are role models for the rest of the city. However, little do they know that the City Council will lay to rest one of their benefactors next month when the full council will vote on the motion to eliminate Crime Prevention Ottawa in the 2010 budget. Abid Jan is co-ordinator of the City of Ottawa’s Community Development Framework.