Livability & Safety
The health, livability, and safety of our community is connected. It requires things like access to affordable housing, caring neighbors, vibrant businesses, broad access to healthcare, strong schools, environmental equity, and justice of all kinds. It requires proactive efforts to ensure harm is avoided or reduced. It also involves the need to hold systems and people accountable when any asset produces harm.
WHAT WE KNOW
There are a number of disparities across a range of factors that reduce community health in South Minneapolis. This includes the number of persons sheltering outdoors, concentration of opioid overdoses, higher air pollution, and a higher percentage of criminal occurrences in comparison to most other areas of the City.
Various indicators suggest that improving our community health, livability, and safety depends on changing various public and private systems and investments. One opportunity involves investing more money, per capita, in public health resources versus community corrections and rehabilitation. In the 2020 Hennepin County budget, the per capita spend on public health resources was $63.40 in comparison to $104.45 on community corrections and rehabilitation. Like most ideas about changes to systems and investments, this requires extensive community input and action over time.
WHAT CAN WE DO NOW?
Addressing current community health, livability, and safety needs requires existing resources and tools. There is a rise in violent crimes occurring in our community, reported and unreported, that demands community-centered and institutional responses. Please note some local resources:
Safe Streets
City of Minneapolis
City plan to reduce severe and fatal crashes on high injury streets.
Contact: Ward 9 Council Office about when plan measures will be implemented on your street.
Livable Streets
City of Minneapolis
Regarding other public infrastructure needs to support livability, including requests for improved lighting
Contact: 311
Youth Support
The Link MN
Provides a range of housing, outreach, and supportive services for youth between 10 to 24 years of age
Emergency Shelter: 211
Youth Services Network
Metro Multi-Agency Network
Online listing aimed at helping youth find shelter and services like healthcare, employment, food, drop in centers, etc.
Relationship Violence
Tubman
Offering a wide range of services from shelter to counseling
24-hour line: (612) 825-0000
MN Day One Crisis Hotline
Statewide Network
Assists persons being hurt or abused get help, get safe, and get support
(866) 223-1111
Mental Health Crisis
Hennepin County
The Cope mobile crisis team can help by phone 24/7
Adults 18 + - (612) 596-1223
Children 17 and under - (612) 348-2233
NAMI
Explore crisis helplines and tips for calling 911 in a psychiatric emergency here.
Life-Threatening Crisis
Minneapolis Police Dpt.
Contact MPD when your life, or others, is at risk. MPD remains a resource for the community.
Contact: 911
WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO GOING FORWARD?
The systems and investments we have now will likely change in a variety of ways. These changes must be shaped by diverse input to achieve equitable and sustainable improvements in health, livability, and safety. As part of our work to help ensure voices across Powderhorn are heard, check out several ways we plan to do this in the coming weeks and months.
Inform
There are a wide range of views about how to improve community health, which includes dramatic changes in policing.
PPNA recently hosted a series of online Town Halls centered around understanding strategies that are being proposed to improve public safety in Minneapolis. You can also watch recordings here and learn more on our blog.
Dig further into topics like police reform, abolition, homelessness, harm reduction, and development using our Resource Repository. We’ll aim to update this on a bi-annual basis
To receive information and meeting notices, sign up for PPNA emails here.
Summarize
The association will use its existing communications to share insights we gather to help make elected and appointed leaders aware and responsive to our community’s views on what’s needed. A recent framework adopted by the South Minneapolis Public Safety Coalition is one example of this. Learn more about that work at ppna.org/smpsc
In some cases, we will invite community members to share certain demographic information. This will help us understand if we are gathering input that reflects some of the diversity that exists across the community.
Check out insight from a recent one-question survey regarding community health on our blog here, and take our 2020 Community Survey here.
Outreach
We will use surveys, partner with volunteer canvassers, and meet with block groups as our primary means to capture community input about ways to strengthen community.
Register your block group here. A representative of PPNA will strive to arrange a time with each group to capture specific thoughts, concerns, and related views about building a stronger community.
Keep an eye on the City of Minneapolis’s Community Safety website for updates about their community engagement process around transforming public safety.
REFERENCE INFO
City of Minneapolis
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Minneapolis City Council Proposed Charter Amendment Article VII and Article VIII
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Transforming Community Safety Resolution (effective June 20, 2020)