Community Safety and Crime Prevention Public Meeting

The Community Safety and Crime Prevention Committee will be presenting their findings on crime within Summerside on October 27th, 7PM at Three Oaks. I believe in order to solve community problems, the community needs to become empowered to come up with solutions. When I took a graduate course on community development, I soon found a common theme in many of the articles and books I read that true community development happens from the bottom up and this committee and its start were a direct result of the community wanting solutions. Looking back through my old assignments, here is a few paragraphs I wrote about empowerment:

"Empowerment is a psychological feeling that individuals have when they believe they can accomplish specific goals. It can also be a group effort in which people are able to collectively work together to challenge political or organizational forces. This process results when ordinary citizens realize that they have power to collectively to confront, control how they proceed, and have final say in decision making." (Rubin et al, 2001)

"Empowerment is used when ordinary people collectively work together to challenge the mobilization of bias. This bias originates from the set of structures, norms, beliefs, rituals, policies, and procedures that operate to benefit certain groups and individuals at the expense of others. An example of these sets of structures would be an employee who speaks openly about mistreatment by their employer. This worker would be perceived by management and by different companies as a “trouble maker” when all he or she is doing is standing up for a certain right or privilege. Empowerment involves community members confronting the rules that favor the rich, the owners of large companies and of government agencies. Empowerment is believed to provide a sense of confidence to build organizations to change cultural rules that have provided individuals with a sense of disempowerment." (Rubin et al, 2001)

I truly believe that we are onto something important with this committee and I look forward to the process and the findings that come out of this. I will be endorsing their report.