Identifying, Engaging and Serving Crime Survivors from under served Communities
Outreach Services Director, Paula Schoenberg
Engaging Communities and providing outreach especially for the under-served population is very important aspect in our roles at Family Advocates, Inc. We need to figure out who the individuals are in our community who are either un-served, under-served and/or who are receiving inadequate services in our counties. To do this we need to talk to community members in the counties we work in to determine where we need to start a focus group or maybe a listening group.
We talked about different organization strategies such as:
Culturally Specific: adapting to each culture. This approach would need training that attempts to impart extensive information and knowledge of perceptions and behaviors that are unique to specific cultures.
Mainstream: led predominately by individuals from majority culture. This model would have us hire someone who could represent that specific culture, which we seem to have a difficult time doing.
Promotor Model: peer to peer model connecting people where they are. When using the Promotor Model you connect where the people are instead of the individuals coming to us. This model seems like the best way to make connections with the individuals who need our help. We would have to find community members who want to help individuals keep safe in their own communities and believe we have their best interests in mind.
The process of finding those community members would be through communication, interaction and involvement to create good relationships. Once you make these relationships we would provide our information to them and work on getting into those communities and commit to change for the better.
Engaging communities will take time and effort which we believe will be beneficial for us as an agency and our communities.