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Anti-violence group urges youth funding

Members of the Youth Violence Prevention Coalition at a news conference last week urged the Union City, City Council to commit to funding youth violence intervention services through parcel tax revenues.

The coalition of community clergy and labor leaders called on the city to include specific language in its parcel tax proposal that would fund youth programs throughout the tax's 20-year duration. The city has baulked at pinning revenues to specific initiatives related to youth intervention programs from the tax on a year-by-year basis.

The coalition wants the city to include funding for data and crime analysis, street outreach workers, counseling services and more after-school programs. By leaving the proposal language general, coalition members said, the city is not committing to funding these programs.

Recent shootings at local schools has renewed political interest in this issue. Many of the cities intervention programs reside with the police department. One of the coalitions contentions is that targeting youth within the school and community organizations will be more effective than housing them within the police department where the recidivism rate is high.

What is Community Engagement Anyway

Community Engagement describes the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.

The classification includes three categories:

Curricular Engagement includes institutions where teaching, learning and scholarship engage faculty, students, and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepen students’ civic and academic learning, enhance community well-being, and enrich the scholarship of the institution.

Outreach & Partnerships includes institutions that provided compelling evidence of one or both of two approaches to community engagement. Outreach focuses on the application and provision of institutional resources for community use with benefits to both campus and community. Partnerships focuses on collaborative interactions with community and related scholarship for the mutually beneficial exchange, exploration, and application of knowledge, information, and resources (research, capacity building, economic development, etc.).

The DonorsChoose Challenge

 

DonorsChoose is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. We are calling all bloggers to help us raise funds for classroom projects submitted by public school teachers across the country. You can pick the classroom needs that speak to you directly. Your readers will be able to fulfill them. And kids will get great educational experiences.