Maybe this is a sign that Norwalk’s community is starting to take charge of being part of the solution. While the usual suspects called for the usual platitudes following the murder of Taekwan Hunt, a small group of community leaders decided the usual was not enough.
At 7 p.m. tonight at the Norwalk YMCA, McQuaid and Romano will hold the first organizational meeting of Norwalk Neighbors Helping our Teens, a citywide group that they hope will be based in various parts of the city like neighborhood associations are, in an effort to meet families on their own turf.
“Every time we have a problem in Norwalk, another group starts up,” Romano said. “It helps for a little while, and then people lose interest. We want to bring everybody in.”
She and McQuaid, an early intervention aide at Naramake Elementary School, hope that this time, things will be different. Pleasantly surprised by the interest they’ve gotten from several quarters in the city — demographics that span clergy, teachers, parents and business people — they hope the group has what it takes to stick around and be effective by using a localized approach.
“We’ve actually got to go into the neighborhoods,” McQuaid said. “We could talk all we want tomorrow night and if we go away, shame on us.”The point of tonight’s meeting is mainly to get feedback and organize, the two said, adding that they hope for a good turnout and clarifying insights from local kids and parents.
McQuaid said the idea grew out of a meeting about four years ago, when “we first had tensions with our teens,” at the Word Alive Bible Church. Some of the same people who are now involved with the group gathered there to discuss youth problems but not much came out of it, he said.
As time has gone by, city youth issues have been growing more and more troublesome to McQuaid, and he said he doesn’t want to feel he’s “talking the talk” without “walking the walk.”
“Some of the kids that we were discussing then are some of the victims now,” he said. “It’s starting to really hit home for me because these are kids that I had in school years ago. It certainly is not political for me because this is my life — I’ve got five kids of my own.”
Somewhere along the line, the community let down the kids who have ended up arrested or hurt in fights that involved guns or knives, he said.
Getting into the neighbourhoods and getting people involved is admirable. The police department could do their share by activating a community based policing groups. The troubling signs of a community on edge are all here on the blog. A group of teens does not make a gang, and the only interaction between a police officer and a resident shouldn’t be at a crime scene.
source: The Hour, ‘Neighbors’ pooling ideas to help teens, February 6, 2008.
