Friday, August 13, 2004
so we had the 'anti-violence summit' the other night here in District 5.
It was a really good event, as there were people there who aren't usually part of the typical discussions, and folks were concentrating on articulating the issues of violence, what causes it, and what to do about it.
A lot of the standard thoughts came out of it, which can be boiled down to: we need to invest in our children early on, we need to teach people how to be good parents and good citizens, that it's hard to get to a job or to a class when you don't feel healthy, and the economic disparity in our society is the dry grass in which violence sparks.
So... what do we do now? A lot of the talk I was part of focused on teaching values and keeping kids busy and thinking. There was abstract talk about different funding for different programs, talk of taxing corporations in a different way... and about how the difficult economy hurts family structures.
What can we do as a society, a city, to fix these problems?
1. fix the economy so more people have jobs, and the city gets more money to invest in good programs. That's tough for one city to do, but we can:
It was a really good event, as there were people there who aren't usually part of the typical discussions, and folks were concentrating on articulating the issues of violence, what causes it, and what to do about it.
A lot of the standard thoughts came out of it, which can be boiled down to: we need to invest in our children early on, we need to teach people how to be good parents and good citizens, that it's hard to get to a job or to a class when you don't feel healthy, and the economic disparity in our society is the dry grass in which violence sparks.
So... what do we do now? A lot of the talk I was part of focused on teaching values and keeping kids busy and thinking. There was abstract talk about different funding for different programs, talk of taxing corporations in a different way... and about how the difficult economy hurts family structures.
What can we do as a society, a city, to fix these problems?
1. fix the economy so more people have jobs, and the city gets more money to invest in good programs. That's tough for one city to do, but we can:
- encourage small businesses in our communities by helping them do business with the city that's better for them (small biz makes up the largest part of the economy)
- encourage our neighbors to shop locally
- encourage our city businesses to hire locally, and have the city contract locally
- promote SF better around the country, and around the world, so tourists come and spend money here
- examine our tax structures so that we neither give away breaks to the corporations nor scare them away with too many taxes
- actively schmooze mid-sized businesses to come here
2. Spend more city money on the right stuff, not the wrong stuff
- curb city salaries, which will also curb retirement benefit costs
- recruit and educate more volunteers to work in their communities, so the city can spend less money doing the little things: trash pick up, graffiti removal, etc.
- recruit more volunteers into the school system, so teachers can teach, volunteers can monitor and help http://www.sfsv.org/index.html
- look at our investments in programs and cut out the bad ones, better fund the good ones.
- stop creating legal battles for the city (which cost money) and write policy and laws that won't need legal challenges.
- stop re-inventing the wheel: there's so much good work/best practices going on out there already, yet here in SF we seem to either forget what we've done, or think no other successful program will work here. I searched for 3 minutes today and found a long report on how we can make changes to our child welfare programs here in the Bay Area... written in 2002. http://www.tyssniffen.com/welfare-reform-ideas.pdf
3. Organize our communities to help one another
- My many ideas about neighborhood groups can be found throughout this site, but again I have to say, if people are involved in their community in some way, they get more involved as time goes on. A sense of ownership is created that allows you to start caring, and voicing that concern. Because I'm involved in my community, I feel able to participate in the 'village raising a child' idea. If we're going to really get to that ideal, we need people to feel like they are a village. To do that, we need to work together.
