A new community coalition launched by Lynchburg Mayor Stephanie Reed, in partnership with the University of Lynchburg’s Center for Leadership, held its first meeting this week, aiming to unite city and nonprofit leaders in an effort to help “take back our streets,” according to the mayor.
To a room inside Diamond Hill Baptist Church packed with representatives from the city’s various nonprofit organizations, as well as members of Lynchburg City Council, administrators from Lynchburg City Schools and Police Chief Ryan Zuidema, Reed stressed the importance of finding ways to keep children in the city from being involved, or targeted, by criminal activity.
“Our innocent babies,” Reed said, “the little ones are still moldable and I want them to have food, and I want them to have clothing, and I want them to be safe, and I want them to have opportunity, to get an education. I want them to not be corrupted as best we can and it’s crucial that we can try to protect them as long as we can.”
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Thursday’s meeting was the first of what Reed and Owen Cardwell, the co-director of the University of Lynchburg’s Center for Leadership, hope to be a regular monthly meeting between all of the various city and faith leaders.
“Tonight’s meeting was fantastic,” Cardwell said. “We have a lot of people that are in the room that are already doing the work, we just need to figure out how to do the work together. Great organizations, great questions and great energy in the room. I think people are ready to tackle the problems of gun and gang violence.”
One of the main topics of the meeting Thursday night was a “collective impact model” proposed by Cardwell and Roger Jones, another co-director at the Center for Leadership.
Cardwell said under the collective impact model, there’s a “backbone organization,” in this case, the Center for Leadership, which helps collect all of the data and programs from all the various nonprofits in order to create a synchronous effort to tackle criminal activity amongst young people.
“We’re encouraging organizations,” Cardwell said. “They don’t have to stop doing what they’re doing, we just need to have a better way of collecting the data and making sure we’re measuring the same things.”
One person in attendance Thursday night, Trae Watkins, said the model needs to be more than just words in the room.
“We’re speaking on the collective impact but it can’t just be a buzz word,” Watkins said. “It has to be a mindset and a philosophy that we believe in because our strength is from the unity. It’s not in uniformity.”
Watkins spoke about a similar community meeting of faith and city leaders years back, where he said after “three-and-a-half hours, the only thing that got done was an email list, contact list got passed around. And it was nothing but bickering and fighting between leaders.
“And it’s sad to me that the solution was in the room, the problem is that the people in the room did not know how to do exactly what you all are preaching about — the collective impact,” Watkins said.
Cardwell said this time will be different.
“The problem has always been that there’s no coordinating organization to make sure that the meetings stay on track,” he said.
“We don’t just need to have good stories, we need good data to demonstrate that we’re moving the needle.”
With an outpouring of support from leaders ready to deploy their resources to curb gun violence in the Hill City that has resulted in the death of three children since late February, Reed said the best thing to come out of Thursday’s meeting is that leaders are “engaged enough and interested enough to plan to come back in a month with the next plan in place.”
“No more talking about the problems,” Reed said. “The next meeting is about where we go from here and I think that’s huge, because there was enough conversation tonight about everybody wanting to make a plan and a strategy.
“We’ve identified the problems, so now we have to identify the solution. And I think that’s the critical piece, that people here are willing to do that.”