Individuals Can Make a Difference!

It only takes one person to start a movement. The following stories demonstrate how one person’s idea or initiative started the ball rolling to help the whole community.

No Community Left Behind

In 2004, Abid Jan took on a big challenge. Working at the South-East Ottawa Community Health Centre, Abid was asked to conduct community leadership training. The problem was there were no community members willing to participate. Abid started looking into this and quickly discovered a high level of fear and intimidation among community members whose lives were being terrorized by gangs and violence in their neighbourhood. 

Upon learning this, Abid decided it was time to take action. He researched existing and successful crime prevention and community engagement models from the United States, the United Kingdom and others and with the help and collaboration of his community, he put together a plan. That plan became No Community Left Behind, an innovative program that encourages social development planning at the neighbourhood level in order to reduce and prevent violent crime, drug abuse, and gang activity in high-crime neighbourhoods. 

The program works on a collaborative model in which police, service providers and city staff and city councillors work together with residents to address issues the community identifies. The program was piloted in the Banff-Ledbury neighbourhood, and a community action process was undertaken to understand the problems and then address them. 

The process began with an assessment survey that engaged residents to recognize the assets in their community and to identify solutions to their problems. Police officers were involved from this first step in order to establish trust. Public information sessions with both service providers and community members were also held to let people know what resources were available to them. Multicultural dinners, held once a week, helped integrate the community by breaking the ice between community members. 

The program has operated in the Banff-Ledbury community since 2005 and the results have been remarkable. The biggest change has been the engagement of community members who had previously been so reluctant to participate in any social activity. The program also strengthened the trust and overall relationship between residents and police. Officers who became known in both community policing and law enforcement roles were able, with the increased cooperation of community members, to remove some of the worst elements creating the fear and crime in the neighbourhood. 

In 2006 No Community Left Behind was launched in the Heatherington, Confederation Court and Russell Heights neighbourhoods. The City of Ottawa noted the success of the community engagement process in this model and has now adopted it as part of its Community Development Framework. 

Connecting his Community

Upon his retirement from more than 30 years as a high school teacher, John Reeder immediately began his second career - volunteering in his community. Although he has been involved in many different volunteer roles, John’s passion for community safety and crime prevention shone through with one initiative in particular. 

In June 2007, John was accepted as a volunteer at the Ottawa Police Somerset Community Police Centre (CPC). Since then, he has volunteered at the centre once a week for four hours at a time, greeting people who come to the centre to learn about crime prevention initiatives or make police-related inquires. John immediately showed great interest in the philosophy of community policing and wanted to help Somerset CPC reach out to the community to promote education and engagement on crime prevention and safety issues. 

His idea was to create a website for the Somerset CPC. Its aim was to demonstrate to people the strength of partnership initiatives between community and police, and how far-reaching the footprint of a community police centre really is. In John’s own words, he was also trying to “showcase the people behind the uniforms”. 

The website was introduced in January 2008 and has grown from 300 to more than 4,000 hits per month. It has had a tremendous impact on how the Somerset Community Police Centre has been able to deliver crime prevention education and information to the public, now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is a wealth of resources, photos and visuals, and an invitation to community members to get to know the police officers working to reduce crime and create safer neighbourhoods. 

The website’s success is largely due to John’s ability to find relevant community safety information and package it in a way that generates public interest. This resource not only lets people know what is going on in their community, but it also delivers the strong message that ordinary people can be empowered to make a difference in their own neighbourhoods. It gives them access to important resources, builds a stronger sense of identification with community police officers, and shows them they are not alone in their concerns or their desire to make their community safer. 

To keep the community well informed on important safety matters as well as to raise awareness for the website, John works under the guidance of Constable Nathan Hoedeman, to create a monthly newsletter for the Somerset CPC. The newsletter is distributed regularly to more than 200 members of the community who are actively involved in crime prevention and community safety issues. With this initiative as well, John has managed to grasp the essence of how to make crime prevention relevant to his audience, always managing to find the right way to present an issue, so that readership continues to grow and so does his community’s engagement with crime prevention.

Visit the Somerset CPC website at: http://www.somersetcpc.com/SMCPC/Splash/index.html