Strategic Initiatives-1

The City of Richmond Street Resource and Outreach Strategy is the first initiative of the City’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) implemented in April 2008.

Components of the Richmond Street Resource and Outreach Strategy include street and school outreach, violence interruption, public education, involvement from faith and community based leadership, community mobilization, and criminal justice participation.

Street/school outreach, high risk conflict mediation and retaliation prevention are perhaps the most vital daily tasks of the Neighborhood Change Agents work.  Neighborhood Change Agents themselves have past histories of creating municipal havoc, been involved in the drug trade, and/or have spent time in prison.

Today these individuals are on the healthy side of the line and are committed to giving back to the community and helping the City’s most high-risk youth and young adults avoid injury, jail and death caused by gun violence.

The Neighborhood Change Agents have a client base and work on changing the behaviors and thinking of those in which their work is focused.  They keep in touch with the community and concentrate on intervening in conflicts, preventing retaliation, brokering social services and steering individuals away from violence to more positive endeavors.  NCA’s help to maintain peace and reduce homicides by leveraging their knowledge of the city to diffuse tensions, meeting with identified high-risk individuals (gang members), negotiating truces and discouraging violence when conflicts erupt. 

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