Over eleven years ago, interested people from various organizations met at Atlantic Middle School to talk about a specific gang problem and what we could collectively do about it. We learned that the problem had actually been handled, but the information hadn’t traveled from Quincy Public Schools security and Quincy Police to the local principal, teachers, and guidance counselors.
What we also learned was just how many great programs we had in the city, but we discovered that most organizations weren’t aware of what the others were doing. We decided to continue our working group in monthly meetings to better map out what we were all doing, and work on ways to coordinate our planning, outreach, and programming.
Representatives came from all over, and were not limited to:
Quincy Public Schools
Quincy Police
Elected Officials (city councilor, state representative
Planning Department
School Committee
Citywide PTO
Quincy Community Action Planning
Sacred Heart Church
YMCA
Atlantic Neighborhood Association
MBTA
Norfolk County Sheriff’s Office
After meeting regularly for a year, the group came up with numerous ideas, one of which was an online resource to coordinate the after-school activities across the city. The goal was to build participation in already-existing programs by increasing awareness of these programs, coordinating them to minimize scheduling conflicts and maximize the time young people could participate, and potentially drop costs by being able to share marketing and promotion expenses.
The document we created was called “Coordinating Quincy’s Kids: A Plan to Streamline Quincy’s After School Activities,” and it was published in December of 2008.
Unfortunately the concept received no support from the then-mayor, nor from the then-director of recreation, and it was abandoned. Still, the findings and bones of the concept are as valuable today as they were then. Maybe some group in the city would be interesting in picking the project back up and seeing if it could help increase after school program participation among Quincy’s youth.
Be the first to comment