Helping people help themselves

Safe Neighborhoods | Youth Development | Civic Participation

San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP), November 19, 2009, San Diego Union Tribune

In 2007, the Rev. Emmet Farrell buried four young people from his church, St. Jude Shrine of the West, within a span of a few months. Each was a victim of gang violence in the Roman Catholic parish's Southcrest neighborhood.

Other pastors and congregations from this neighborhood and nearby neighborhoods, all members of the San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP), experienced a similar rise in violence. In response, SDOP launched the Year of the Youth in 2008 to compel elected officials to prioritize youth services.

As a result, Mayor Jerry Sanders launched a task force in February to combat youth violence in southeastern San Diego, with the cooperation of San Diego County and the San Diego Unified School District. The task force, although only 9 months old, has already created new partnerships resulting in collaborative, data-driven approaches. The school district created a centralized Office of Dropout Prevention that for the first time gathers and analyzes student attendance and truancy data. This data are being used by the district, police and county Probation Department to revise curfew and truancy sweeps, resulting in the highest ever daily attendance rate for all students systemwide: 95.4 percent. Among subgroups of students, the most significant attendance gains were realized by African-American and Latino student populations.

Simply keeping kids in school has already demonstrated results - all but one school in the target area improved academically over the last school year.

This is not the first time that Sanders and SDOP have collaborated to create something new in San Diego. In the 1990s, SDOP worked with then-Police Chief Sanders to make the Police Department more responsive to the community, reaching out to neighborhoods and working closely with residents to address San Diego's public safety needs.

This led to the creation of Neighborhood Pride and Protection, a $19.5 million program to address the drug and gang epidemic in San Diego. As a result, community policing was implemented across the city, gang prevention and after-school programs were established and drug treatment beds were increased.

Chief Sanders gained national recognition for this pioneering work and, with active assistance from SDOP and the community, achieved a more than 40 percent decrease in crime during the six-year period he led the department. This program is now recognized as the national model for community policing.

For the past 30 years, SDOP's model of community organizing, emphasizing a self-help approach, has trained thousands of ordinary citizens to do extraordinary things. SDOP's volunteer leaders have led efforts to address public safety, education reform, the lack of affordable housing, health care reform and now youth opportunity.

SDOP is a multicultural, multifaith organization representing 28 communities and congregations and more than 45,000 families. At the heart of SDOP's mission is the process of helping people help themselves.

SDOP believes that when ordinary citizens are active participants in public life, our democracy becomes vital and effective. SDOP's volunteer community leaders have a 30-year history of identifying community problems, mobilizing a grass-roots constituency and then working respectfully with city, county, state and federal governments to find and implement solutions. We are lifting up a new vision for San Diego that unites people across race, class, politics and religion.

As a result of SDOP's leadership, a foundation of civic participation and community infrastructure has been created which, over the long term, will serve San Diego's many needs - not just for this generation, but also for those yet to come.

Last night, SDOP and its many supporters commemorated 30 years of community organizing in San Diego with an anniversary gala dinner hosted by Mayor Sanders and his wife. We agree that there is indeed plenty to celebrate!