Community Crime Prevention Guide
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Develop a Community Crime Prevention Action Plan
Mobilize the Community
Mobilizing the community is essential in setting priorities and selecting targets. It involves identifying partners and building collaborative relationships.
Identifying Partners
Partnerships have become an effective way of creating safer communities. By working together, partners can understand the factors that contribute to crime and safety problems, develop a well-balanced strategy for intervention and put that strategy into action for the benefit of everyone.
When thinking of potential partners, it may be helpful to develop an inventory of possible partners. Potential partners for a crime prevention project include:
- Police
- Community Corrections
- crime prevention associations and groups
- government agencies
- community organizations
- seniors groups
- youth organizations
- service clubs
- small businesses, large corporations and industry
- business associations
- media
- schools
- academic partners – colleges and universities
- representatives from diverse communities, such as ethnocultural, Aboriginal, people with disabilities, by gender and/or sexual orientation, youth, elders and faith communities
- libraries
Alternatively, a list of potential partners can be generated by thinking about the kind of people that should be mobilized to ensure the success for your crime prevention plan.
It may be useful to consider the following questions:
- Who is affected by crime and crime-related problems?
- Who is at risk or vulnerable in your community?
- Who can provide political or financial support?
- Who has a stake in ensuring the project succeeds?
- Who is genuinely interested and wants to help?
- Who is already working in crime prevention?
- Are different cultural groups represented?
- Are community members with special needs represented?
Building Collaborative Relationships
Mobilizing the community involves building successful collaboration. Collaborative relationships are characterized by a commitment to mutual goals, a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility, mutual authority and accountability for success and sharing of resources and rewards. For example, in an effort to reduce youth crime, leaders from the local school board, police force, mental health services, youth services and social services could form a collaborative body that meets regularly to discuss and implement ways of addressing the issue in a comprehensive manner.
Since making decisions through consensus is required, each partner gives up some of their autonomy and decision-making power. It is important to make sure partnerships and processes are inclusive and representative of the diversity in your community. Culturally relevant approaches will be needed to meet the needs of people from diverse communities.
Because individuals from different sectors are used to functioning in their own way, collaboration requires patience and perseverance from all involved. Often, the most effective collaborative relationships are long-term alliances that allow the development of strong trust among the involved organizations.
Research has identified that clear communication is essential for making collaborations work.
For example, clarity around the roles of partners is important. These roles may include:
- sharing specialized skills, such as networking, marketing or planning;
- sharing ideas and perspectives to address complex issues;
- co-ordinating of services and initiatives;
- identifying roles and responsibilities;
- making services readily available to clients;
- finding volunteers;
- donating space or equipment; or
- fundraising.
Ideally, the decisions around roles should be put into a written agreement.
You may wish to use one of the templates available in resources that address community development and mobilization, such as Building Successful Collaborations: A guide to collaboration among non-profit agencies and between non-profit agencies and businesses
(2006) (PDF/661KB).
Resources
Many useful resources have been developed in B.C. and around the world. Here are a few to begin with.
The Partnership Toolkit: Tools for Building and Sustaining Partnerships (PDF/563KB). Developed in 2001 with input from over 130 people and 90 organizations in B.C., this comprehensive, 132-page toolkit includes the following topics:
- outreach and identifying potential partners
- a partnership rating tool
- working with funders
- management and decision making
- ensuring accountability
- a model partnership agreement
- legal and liability issues
- effective internal communications
- promotion and public relations
- resolving conflict
- evaluation
Building Community Capacity: Close attention to local conditions and community readiness to change are fundamental requirements for mobilization. Some level of capacity is necessary for effective community mobilization. Community capacity has been defined as a community’s collective ability to undertake collective action.
Capacity includes many assets or dimensions, including:
- a shared sense of community;
- individual and collective knowledge, skills and ability;
- infrastructure; and
- enabling policies and systems.
Community Capacity Building – A Practical Guide: Given the complexity of community life, there is no single solution that will suit all. It is important that communities identify their own priorities and activities in a crime prevention plan. The guide identifies and provides information on three key stages in developing community capacity:
- Understanding who the community is and what needs they have.
- Engaged in community-identified programs and actions that will address these concerns.
- Measuring the outcomes of these efforts to see whether these actions are effective in practice.
The Community Capacity Building Tool: Although developed for community-based health projects, this guide can also be used for crime prevention projects. It was developed through a research project that draws on the expertise of practitioners and researchers from across Canada. The tool has nine features that, together, describe community capacity. Each feature is presented with questions for a project committee to discuss. The answers to the questions help with further planning.
