Concerned About Drug and Alcohol Use in Your Community?
Learn how ALERT Partnership can help
Ten Things You Can Do to Help Keep Your Neighborhood Safe
- If you don’t know your neighbors, introduce yourself and your family. Say “hi” every day to children and adults.
- Participate in your neighborhood watch, block watch or neighborhood association. If there is no group like this in your neighborhood, form one. Contact ALERT Partnership by calling 610-402-CARE for help and support.
- In neighborhood meetings, take time to focus on positive things. Find out your neighbors’ talents. Share recipes. Host a meeting. Nothing dampens people’s enthusiasm more than dwelling on problems.
- Get to know your local police officers. Build a partnership with them, focusing on solving problems before they become a crisis.
- Work with your neighbors, the police or sheriff’s department, hospitals, transportation, elected officials and others to address dangerous situations in your neighborhood. Don’t be shy about letting them know your neighborhoods’ needs.
- Ensure children have positive ways to spend their time. Volunteer to help organize recreation, tutoring programs, neighborhood cleanups and anything that could involve youth. Hire a neighborhood child to mow your lawn.
- Make sure your home and street are well lighted.
- Clean up your neighborhood. Involve kids and their families.
- Reach out to neighbors in need by providing friendship and support. Sometimes people just need to know they have someone to talk to. Offer to help with housework, child care or just listen.
It’s no secret that drug and alcohol abuse is damaging to your health – your physical, emotional and social health. It’s also damaging to those around you – your family, your friends and your community.
That’s why ALERT Partnership is dedicated to preventing alcohol and drug abuse and related social problems like crime in Lehigh Valley communities. We work hard to raise awareness about these abuses, get people the help and resources they need to help themselves, their loved ones and their communities.
Learn how ALERT Partnership can help you and your community and how they’ve helped others:
Educate children and adults about drug and alcohol abuse and related problems:
- Hosts drug and alcohol abuse prevention programs to school groups and community organizations
- Provides education on drugs to communities
- Forms partnerships between community members and government to develop neighborhood associations and block watches
- Provided over $200,000 in seed money to more than 200 Lehigh Valley organizations for drug and alcohol prevention programs
- Discourage adults from providing alcohol to teens to prevent youth’s access to alcohol
- Worked with East Penn School District on “Take Back Our Children.” It included a Safe Student awareness campaign to prevent drunk driving and enhance enforcement during the high-risk spring driving season.
Improve quality of life in the Lehigh Valley by strengthening communities:
- Educates community members and encourages them to get involved in public safety and community policing, especially in distressed center-city neighborhoods
- Helps communities work together to fight substance abuse issues
- Leads Allentown’s Integrated Drug Enforcement Assistance
- Helped develop Operation Nite Lites in Allentown, pairing juvenile probation officers and police officers to monitor youth on probation (in partnership with the Lehigh County Task Force on Youth Crime and Violence)
- Helped the Allentown School District develop a school resource officer program to increase school safety
- Collaborated with Bethlehem’s Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan to define neighborhood problems and address them
- Mobilized a coalition among the City of Bethlehem, Bethlehem Area School District’s Family Centers and residents to implement Communities That Care, a program to prevent youth violence and substance abuse
- Partnered with the City of Easton, police and community members to form over 200 block watches and develop community policing
Getting High School Students to “Arrive Alive”
Students at Northampton Area High School received a dose of reality before prom and graduation season from Operation Arrive Alive (OAA). A project supported by the ALERT Partnership, the Emergency Medicine Institute, University MedEvac, local pre-hospital caregivers, the trauma division and LVH—Cedar Crest emergency department and pastoral care colleagues, it teaches local high school students the perils of driving under the influence. The team staged a mock car crash, with colleagues caring for the “wounded,” detaining the “driver” and flying the “injured students” to LVHHN. The next day, a memorial service was held for students who “died” in the mock crash. A similar program was staged at Parkland High School.
This page last updated 2/12/08 04:08 PM
