Neighborhood Safety-Part 2

Our first post in this series was on encouraging businesses to work with crime prevention and the local neighborhood by encouraging employees to volunteer with residents to add extra patrols and communicate suspicious activities to police. This post focuses on providing resources to help with social needs within neighborhoods. There is a plethora of social service agencies in Portland. Most are overloaded with requests. Many homeless persons or vagrants are down and out. Some make their living at begging. Those with legitimate needs may not have access to transportation to access available services. Some avoid social services due to bad experiences, a criminal history, substance abuse or mental health problems. Businesses with some financial means can help by funding a neighborhood-based informal drop-in day center. Businesses with meager resources can help by providing sack lunches, coffee, board games, decks of cards, tangible resources such as toiletries or new socks. Rather than donating these to a social service agency with no way to ensure a benefit to the neighborhood, consider working with the neighborhood association, local churches, and businesses to bring resources to those in the neighborhood. A day center may provide sack lunches, and repeated relational contacts. Rather than referring homeless persons elsewhere, work with partner organizations to help provide stabilization to those known to live in or frequent the area. To encourage repeat participation tie provision of tangible resources such as a bus ticket or pair of socks to one per visit. Keep statistics on the number of sack lunches or other services provided to communicate the value. Keep copious notes to see if there are fewer street beggars or if crime diminishes by providing homeless persons a safe place in the neighborhood.