Monday, January 5, 2009

Update on our December Meeting and 2009 GOALS!






Dear all,
Here I am sending you and our neighbors a note to update you on our last Valle del Oro meeting. The meeting/potluck went well and was well attended. We had approximately 40 people, mostly from The Village. Jackie Ponce and Alex Ruano did a wonderful job at getting everything ready and beautiful for our gathering. And the food was delicious and abundant!! We all had a good time together including the many children that joined us.

After our meal we talked about our work together during 2008 and the issues that still remain unresolved and continue to be our focus for 2009. One general and urgent concern was the matter of safety. The majority of the neighbors felt that having the phone numbers to reach city staff and law enforcement helped, but that most of the crime they witness goes unreported due to fear. Most choose to not call and report the issues with law enforcement or the property managers as they are afraid that the "troublemakers" will immediately know (or assume they know) who reported them and will start threatening them and their families, a risk most feel they can't take. Several neighbors also shared that the property managers' very high turnover has to do with intimidation from local gangs: as soon as they start trying to "clean up" the complex, the managers and their families become victims of intimidation. It would be interesting to see if we could get these administrators to relate their experiences to this committee but this task has proven difficult. Perhaps one thing to pursue is to have members of this committee meet with the apartment complex management in THEIR turf, in their office, on their schedule, instead of trying to bring them to our Wednesday meetings.

Issues that greatly concerned neighbors, in addition to the safety issue, are vandalism, robberies, loud partying, after-hours gatherings, shootings in the middle of the night, youth hanging out at all times of day, alcoholism, and drug dealing.

And here are the Valle del Oro Committee 2009 Goals:

1) Advocate at every level for a new centro comunitario/community center based in our neighborhood.
This center is essential to the success of our committee's objectives and to the health of our neighborhood. The center would be not only a place of communal gathering but also a site for learning, teaching, recreation, sharing and growing. TOGETHER. Programming at the center would support multiple community needs as well as youth, adult and family needs. The committee will work towards creating a strategic plan to attain this goal. Soon, the committee will begin advocating at the City Council level. And, in addition to the long-term goals, the committee will propose and pursue short term solutions to address communal, recreation and educational programming needs including finding a temporary location for a "community/educational space" in our neighborhood as soon as possible.

2) A safe and healthy neighborhood
The committee will work to create a multifaceted strategy to address serious issues concerning the safety of our families. This strategy will not only include continuing to work with law enforcement personnel and City staff, but also work on community education, tolerance, youth leadership training, empathy training, arts training, crime prevention, etc. as a way of providing educational and community-focused alternatives to the youth and their families.

3) Strengthen the Committee
The strengthening of the committee's presence, membership, organization and functions is essential to attaining all 2009 goals. It will be our objective for the Valle del Oro Committee to grow in numbers and also expand the leadership. Once this has been accomplished we will be able to create sub-committees (each reporting to the neighbors in our monthly committee meetings) that will be charged with leading the work towards attaining each of the goals listed here. The committee will work on expanding its visibility outside of its regular monthly meetings by holding regular public informal gatherings in our neighborhood and outreaching to the community, with the main objective of letting our neighbors know of our work, goals and ways to get involved. We trust that larger membership, increased visibility and a consistent message will deter some of the criminal activity and help us define what our community will become. It will also allow us to define that which we will not tolerate in our neighborhood, and will provide support to potential victims of crime.

The committee now has a blog, our virtual forum on the net, now residing at: http://valledeloro.blogspot.com/
The blog will serve many functions, including:
-being a "virtual community center", a forum for dialog, always open and available
-an archive for Committee meeting minutes, updates, calls for action, etc.
We recognize that this blog is just one more way through which we can keep our community informed and connected, and should be part of a larger set of strategies that will include those without net access.

4) Strengthen our partnership with the management companies from The Terrace and The Village
Here the stress in on PARTNERSHIP as finger pointing has not taken us anywhere. Several attempts to involve and invite the management companies to our community-organizing meetings have failed. Still, we recognize that the management companies are a fundamental "piece of the puzzle" and in order to be successful in our efforts to have a safe community the committee will need to work with them. Some strategies that will be explored are finding ways to meet regularly with the management and report back to the neighbors. Committee representatives will need to be identified to take on this task. Some neighbors are also interested in investigating Section 8 compliance at The Village Apartments.

5) Work with City staff on a publication in Spanish to serve as a complement to the City-published English-only SCV Seasons Magazine
This publication will allow Spanish-speaking citizens in our valley to have access to the network of centers and wide-ranging educational and recreational programming available to them. It will also allow these families to feel connected to the City and its work in a myriad of ways, and to become more active civic participants.

We are thankful to Cynthia Llerenas, Hope Horner and the City of Santa Clarita for their support throughout this last year, which was essential in getting our neighbors working together. We are looking forward to more dynamic dialog with them in 2009. We are committed to changing our neighborhood for the better and to carefully conceive strategies born from the Committee that would fit the specific issues and location of our neighborhood. Your input and support is always appreciated.

I hope you had a wonderful holiday. Best wishes for you and yours in this new year!

Evelyn Serrano