The Newhallville Resiliency Team (click here and here to read about the group’s formation and activities in 2014) send in this summary of its most recent meeting.
On December 13th the Newhallville Community Resilience Team (NCRT) held its third Community Conversation. The dignitaries who joined the conversation held at ConnCAT were impressive: State Representative Robyn Porter; Alder Delphine Clyburn; Jason Bartlett, New Haven’s Youth Department; Barbara Tinney, New Haven Family Alliance; Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, NH Board of Education; Stephen Cremin-Endes, Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven; Erik Clemons, ConnCAT; Carley Riley and Brita Roy, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, Yale; and NHPD Chief Dean Esserman.
Teresa A. Smith Hines, co-chair of NCRT, started the meeting by explaining the results of the community resilience and social cohesion survey, conducted under the auspices of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Carley Riley and Brita Roy of Yale University. The results were both as expected and surprising – Newhallville is a distressed neighborhood. Keynote speaker Maurice Williams, Community Outreach Liaison Coordinator with the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, expressed the need for neighbors to get to know each other, and to look out for one another. He declared the end to the “no snitch” rule and instead to “do the right thing” and protect your neighbors and family. Finally, he called for all the agencies, groups and individuals aiding New Haven to coordinate and communicate with each other under one umbrella.
Jason Bartlett spoke about the Byrne Grant for Newhallville. This grant will bring funding to support the “Newhallville Safe Neighborhood Initiative”, which is a program bringing the New Haven Police Department and other stakeholders together to address crime rates in the area. Once the budget is finalized he will be seeking residents’ feedback and suggestions. Stephen Cremin-Endes informed the group of the three to five completely renovated homes that will be available in early 2015 in Newhallville and spoke of how his organization’s work contributes to the transformation of Newhallville.
The NCRT will hold another Community Conversation to share this information and updates on Newhallville’s progress sometime early next year. Anyone interested in getting involved, needing more information, or wanting to sign up for our e‑mail updates, can contact Mrs. Smith Hines or Ms. Fawcett here.
I'd like to help neighbors understand how they can use SeeClickFix to get to know each other, put the City to work for their neighborhood and start to break down barriers to speaking up.
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