The following resources can help guide and inform community engagement efforts.
- Community Engagement: This BCJI paper covers why and how to involve residents in planning and decision-making.
- Collective Efficacy: This brief BCJI Concept Intro paper describes how creating stronger community bonds can make neighborhoods safer.
- Authentic Community Engagement: This presentation by LISC BCJI staff talks about what engaging the community really looks like and showcases some local examples.
- Going Back to the Engagement Drawing Board: This article tells you how to get started with community engagement efforts, or how to restart them if they have stalled.
- Generating Collective Will and Momentum for your BCJI Initiative: Residents and other community leaders are often in the best positions to motivate, implement and sustain change over time in neighborhoods. In this webinar, LISC unpacks what community engagement—a core element of BCJI—means for the program, presenting key principles for engaging neighborhood stakeholders in place-based crime reduction initiatives.
- Building Community Leadership for Sustainable Crime Reduction: In this webinar, representatives of the BCJI sites in Brownsville (Brooklyn) and Seattle discuss the fundamentals of meaningful community engagement and how they have involved residents in decision-making about crime reduction strategies.
- Taking a Trauma-informed Approach while Improving Community Safety: This webinar includes an introduction to different types of trauma, including research on how individual experiences may coalesce over time to create historical trauma and group behaviors that can be misunderstood as aggressive, creating conflict with police and social services. Topics include trauma-informed strategies that build resiliency in—and improve relationships with—those who have experienced past trauma.