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By Tarez Eisen
Once plagued with high crime and at times with the label of “most dangerous city in America,” Newark can now look to a brighter future of urban renewal.
Critical to Newark’s revitalization is the Center for Collaborative Change, a nonprofit consulting firm devoted to building and sustaining relationships between community members and leaders, and fostering policy development that includes and responds to the needs of all community stakeholders—residential, governmental, nonprofit, philanthropic, and industrial.
The Center for Collaborative Change, founded in 2009 by Executive Director Laurel Dumont with the support of Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, sees Newark as a city on the cusp of renovation. According to Dumont, because of Mayor Booker’s tremendous amount of attention to the city’s untapped potential, federal interest in urban revitalization, and economic stimulus money pumped into the city by way of the $17.5 billion in benefits to New Jersey, Newark is the perfect place for an initiative like the Center’s. “There was an infusion of not just money, but attention and ideas,” says Dumont. “And people, who want to come and give up their time, give of themselves, and be part of what’s happening.”
“What’s happening” first caught the attention of Dumont when she came to Newark as a public school teacher with Teach for America in 2000. As a teacher, she says she was exposed to how much need there really was for support and increased opportunity for youth and families in the urban core. Once she stepped away from “the cinderblocks” of her classroom in 2002 and, as she says, “discovered Newark,” she was “able to then tap different aspects of the community and realize there was just such tremendous energy around change and collaboration in Newark.”
Leveraging these resources for significant change in Newark requires addressing two major unmet needs with which the city government, in Dumont’s opinion, could use the help of an outside agency like the Center. The first, Dumont says, is to identify the high priority needs, or “gaps” in the system within each of the city’s departments, by talking with all involved in the community. By looking at Detroit or Baltimore’s models implemented in dealing with crimes like vehicle theft as well as examining inefficiencies in city government, the Center can begin to find appropriate policies and programs to address Newark’s needs, then connect with Newark’s existing resources, and advise the city on how to transform and execute them in Newark.
This first need sparked the use of the community consultation model that was developed by Dumont in Newark Community Court and is the hallmark of the Center. In this model, in community forums, residents affected by low-level crimes were asked to identify the chief problems in their neighborhoods and offer suggestions for social services, like drug treatment or community service, for dealing with offenders.
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