“The stoop lights immediately had an impact.”- Kathy Barnes, Hartranft Playground Alliance.

Nearly 400 stoop lights now illuminate the streets of the Fairhill-Hartranft community in North Philadelphia, providing an added layer of comfort outside at night. It’s all part of the Community Safety Project, an initiative that The Village of Arts and Humanities stewards in partnership with residents and fellow neighborhood organizations to proactively address violence and harm in a way that centers community care.

In this heavily disinvested neighborhood, the majority of community households fall below the poverty line. We also have one of the city’s highest incarceration and recidivism rates, so the need for the resources is acute.

The Community Safety Project seeks to help fill that gap. This work began in 2021 after the Department of Justice’s Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative provided The Village with a grant designed to allow neighborhood residents to craft a community safety model based on their own needs, values, and community institutions, where they could focus on care-based alternatives to policing.

To accomplish this, we assembled a core team of community residents, experts, and organizational leaders to begin a planning process prioritizing knowledge-building, participatory research, and collaborative design. Our project partners include the Hartranft Playground Alliance, Hope Partnership for Education, Ones Up, and Temple Safety Net. The core project team determined that communities with the most resources, such as housing, healthcare, education, and recreation, are the safest communities as opposed to communities with the most police presence.

“We as a society have come to over-rely on police to solve a remarkably wide range of societal problems,” said Eli Plenk, Director of Social Justice Initiatives at The Village. “I think the police would actually be the first to tell you they are not the right people to respond to a lot of these issues.  And since at least the 80s, big city governments have almost uniformly inflated police budgets while dramatically slashing funding for things like public education, job training, public transit, mental and physical health resources, etc. That has had devastating consequences for communities like Fairhill-Hartranft.  This project aims to, in some small way, reverse that trend by bringing non-police resources and decision-making power back into the community.”

The team partnered with Dr. Ajima Olajhere at Temple University to follow a community-based participatory research framework to do neighborhood outreach. After completing this process, our team made several determinations for how to implement a plan rooted in our neighborhood’s experience and hopes. For instance, “public safety” must mean caring for the well-being of all people with no exceptions and that we need expert non-police professionals to respond to crises since police can cause significant harm to communities.

“Safety to me is economic opportunity, the longevity of our elders, and recreation for our children,” said Kathy Barnes, a longtime resident and President of the Hartranft Playground Alliance.

In 2023, Eli Plenk joined The Village of Arts and Humanities as Director of Social Justice Initiatives. His role primarily centers on stewarding this project alongside community members. Eli is a teacher, organizer, and writer who has focused on developing holistic approaches to safety, often in partnership with youth. Before joining The Village, Eli helped lead the Philadelphia Bail Fund and spent several years building restorative justice programs alongside youth impacted by the criminal legal system in Massachusetts.

“So much of the work I’ve done before coming to The Village felt reactive, and I saw in this project the opportunity to be a small part of something proactive, something which built real and lasting solutions rather than just made people’s lives a little less bad,” said Plenk. “More than anything, I was drawn to this project because it felt deeply rooted in this community, and I think that the only way to address an issue as intractable as community violence is to have folks in the community come up with and implement solutions.”

One of the project’s objectives is to foster a physical environment that discourages violence, builds community, and promotes community engagement. We began this process with the “Stoop Light Initiative,” where we worked with a crew from the neighborhood to install solar lights on rowhomes to provide increased street lighting. We originally ordered 300 lights but had to get nearly a hundred additional lights due to their popularity.

Another priority of this project is to build community power to drive organizing and systemic social change capable of reversing decades of disinvestment. In April 2024, also known as Second Chance Month, we hosted an Expungement Clinic and Resource Fair in partnership with Community Legal Services and Ones Up. Approximately 30 community members received free legal assistance from CLS attorneys on criminal record clearing and housing stabilization. We also launched a political education program series for our young people led by local community organizer Fred Ginyard and teamed up with the People’s Budget Office for a Budget 101 Neighborhood Workshop, where community members learned how the Philadelphia City Budget works and voiced their funding priorities.

As part of this work, we also seek to employ care-based interventions before and after violence occurs. One way we plan to do this is by partnering with Temple University’s Cradle To Grave Program, a Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program (HVIP) designed to engage victims of violence and prevent retaliation following a gun-related incident.

The final objective of this project is to reduce structural drivers of community violence. We plan to do this by relaunching a community storefront, where community members will have access to services, including support for people in reentry, and working with the Network of Neighbors.

You can join the conversation with Network of Neighbors on Thursday, August 15, 2024, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at The Civic Power Studio (2516 N Alder St, Philadelphia, PA 19133) to learn more about how you can get involved in creating a Fairhill-Hartranft Trauma Response Team. The Village will provide free dinner.

You can save the date for our other monthly meetings:

• Thursday, September 26, 2024, 6 to 7:30 p.m.
• Thursday, October 17, 2024, 6 to 7:30 p.m.
• Thursday, November 21, 2024, 6 to 7:30 p.m.
• Thursday, December 19, 2024, 6 to 7:30 p.m.

Barnes encourages residents to join, “The more community participation we get, the better the outcome.”

If you are a community member, we hope that you can attend the upcoming meetings. To register, fill out this form. We will provide free dinner at all meetings. You can also contact Eli Plenk at eli@villagearts.org or 215-436-9750.