The Southwest Detroit Weed & Seed
Ms. Reyes provides the leadership as the chairperson for this community-wide collaboration to reduce crime in the Southwest Detroit community. Funding for this initiative comes from the USDOJ, Community Capacity Development Office (CCDO), which supports several efforts for “weeding” out crime & “seeding” in prevention, including 1) community revitalization 2) community policing 3) prevention, intervention and treatment focused on gang prevention and prisoner reentry, and 4) law enforcement. This includes resources to support additional police patrols in the community. Funding from the collaboration also supports our ability to provide gang awareness and cultural sensitivity training to school staff and law enforcement agencies; gang prevention sessions to students in the local middle schools; and a portion of our prisoner reentry program.
Other Weed and Seed funding goes to local community organizations to help clean up the community, remove graffiti, organize parent patrols, and engage community residents, including youth, in leadership positions. It has also helped the partners to work better together across sectors (community, law enforcement, business and residents), make better use of limited resources and increase the social capital. For example, DHDC is able to focus our efforts on helping youth leave gangs, while law enforcement can focus their resources on removing the most violent individuals from the streets. We hope to build on the work of the SW Weed & Seed to focus more intensely on reducing gang violence.
Throughout our history DHDC has built a unique model and expertise in effective gang prevention and intervention programs upon which we have built measurable, sustainable criteria. This work has resulted in increasing inquiries for technical assistance both from across the city and nationally. We are currently studying the framework developed by the Advancement Project to reduce the level of gang violence in LA, and the ways in which it corresponds to the work we have been doing in this community, and the possibility of collaboration to address this national (and international) epidemic.