Love is Action

By Pamla Manazer

In 1970, local police organizations, in concert with various city charters, introduced the Neighborhood Watch program. These neighborhood associations typically involved recruiting residents to participate in community meetings and various surveillance tasks around properties and common areas they considered, “their own.” Often a block captain and coordinator would take a leadership role and serve as liaisons to the local police.

These programs were very successful because with a minimum of instruction and training, local police departments were able to reach out to people like you and me and ask for help.

This almost instantly allowed local law enforcement to cast a wider net around behaviors that could be compromise neighborhood safety. None of those recruited carried a gun or could make life changing decisions for their community as this was merely “law enforcement reinforcement.”

A big key to the success of the Neighborhood Watch program was the ability of the police organization to answer a question that arose time and time again at community meetings by John Q. Citizen, “What can I do to help? I’m not a policeman?”

With an agreed upon blueprint, people were able to help their communities by assisting law enforcement with in-place oversight, creating a win-win scenario. Appropriate parts of police coverage were expanded by minimally instructed non-police professionals, rewarded simply by their passion to contribute to safer communities. People felt safer, law enforcement felt better understood, and this self-propagating program it is still working decades later.

If only there was a program, a blueprint like the one offered through Neighborhood Watch, that could bring together, under appropriate oversight, the loving and willing people who have responded to the plea for help surrounding the human trafficking epidemic in which we now find ourselves. The same questions are being repeatedly asked: “What can I do to help?”

Look no further: The LOVE IS ACTION COMMUNITY INITIATIVE is just such a blueprint. Anchored by stakeholders in the community and staffed with everyone from the woman who wants to bake a birthday cake to the mechanic who can offer a fee oil change to a foster parent, we can change lives.

By offering our blueprint to already in place organizations that agree to be Love Is Action Champions in their area, Successful Survivors Foundation can guide them in engaging the community in support of the good work they already do so well. At the same time, their dream of expanding their reach to include people, businesses, houses of worship, and civic groups that are just waiting to be given a “No Big Deal” task, becomes a reality.

The Love is Action Community Initiative blueprint helps identify and then connect a person’s, “No Big Deal” where its needed most!

Do you know what your “No Big Deal” is? More importantly, do you know where it is desperately needed? Visit our website to find out what you’ve been missing. You might be the Love Is Action Champion who is needed in your community.

Please join us at: www.loveisactioncommunityinitiative.org for details.

About the author: Pamla Manazer serves as the Executive Director of the Successful Survivors Foundation, which is behind the volunteer-led, professional overseen LOVE IS ACTION COMMUNITY INITIATIVE. You can contact Pamla at pam@successfulsurvivors.org or at (949) 307-6067.