On an 80° day in Cleveland, Ohio, Mayor Justin Bibb took a walk down Professor Street in Tremont, asked questions of community members, and listened to their answers. Tremont’s neighborhood newspaper, The Tremonster, tagged along to document Mayor Bibb’s unique approach to connecting with our residents and businesses directly—by walking through our neighborhood, himself.
Tag: Rich Weiss
Community meeting on consent decree to focus on CDP search and seizure practices
By Rich Weiss, Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland
The Cleveland Consent Decree mandates that the City of Cleveland Division of Police conduct all investigatory stops, searches, and arrests fairly and respectfully as part of an effective overall crime prevention strategy that considers community values.
How well they are discharging that mandate is the subject of the next community conversation in the series of discussions jointly sponsored by United Way of Greater Cleveland and the Cleveland NAACP.
The next meeting in the series is this Wednesday, August 11 at 6:00 p. The theme will be Search and Seizure. The public is invited and encouraged to attend these sessions to help in the monitoring process.
To attend, ask questions or voice your concerns, register for any of the four remaining Consent Decree public meetings by visiting unitedwaycleveland.org.
The meetings are conducted via Zoom on the second Wednesday of each month. The July meeting focused on “Bias-Free Policing and Racial Profiling,” Among the topics raised last month:
- “What does ‘trained, bias-free policing policies’ mean practically, and what does that training look like?
- How do we justify over-policing in communities of color and lower-income communities?
- How are we measuring success with these initiatives?
Richard T. Andrews contributed to this report.
Community members needed to join fifth Cleveland Consent Decree Community Conversation sponsored by NAACP- Cleveland Chapter and United Way of Greater Cleveland: 6:00 pm, May 12
By Rich Weiss, for Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland
If you missed your chance to attend the April 15th public input meeting on the Cleveland Police Consent Decree, your input is still needed for the upcoming Consent Decree Community Conversation at 6:00 pm on May 12 (on Zoom). This public meeting (co-sponsored by the local chapters of the United Way and NAACP) seeks your opinions and questions on progress of the Cleveland Division of Police in the areas of Crisis Intervention and Officer Wellness.
According to Roger Smith, Administrator of Cleveland’s Office of Professional Standards, “It’s really what the grassroots wants that should be driving this train. It’s important for public figures and people who work in public agencies to understand with clarity what it is the community wants, here—what role they want the police to play in their communities and what kind of rules do they want to govern those interactions. The only way to find that out is to get it from the community.”
Continue readingVancouver New Leaf Project Study Shows One-Time Direct Cash Transfers Positively Impact Homeless
By Rich Weiss & Jeneane Vanderhoff
This story was sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative (NEOSOJO), which is composed of 20-plus Northeast Ohio news outlets including The West Park Times, The Cleveland Street Chronicle, and The Tremonster, each of which contributed significantly to this report.
Thousands of people experience homelessness in Cleveland and Akron every year. But what if these people were given money? Money that they could use to dig their way out of poverty and turn a new leaf?
When the Poverty and Homelessness Beat Reporter for The Tremonster, Jeneane Vanderhoff (currently experiencing homelessness along with her husband, Adam), was considering reporting on any existing solution that might help alleviate the problem of homelessness in Northeast Ohio, she said, “I read a study—I think it was Canada—they just recently gave homeless people $7,500 and saw how the people spent it. It basically got them out of homelessness. It did quite a bit to turn their lives around; they really didn’t waste the money—it’s a recent study.”
Our research led us to The New Leaf project in Vancouver, Canada, which recently published the study Vanderhoff had noticed. The Vancouver-based project demonstrated that money from one-time cash transfers was spent wisely and provided stability in the lives of individuals recently experiencing homelessness.
Continue readingLocal Media: a Place for Your Interests, Your Perspective, and Your Voice
by Rich Weiss and R. T. Andrews
The proliferation of fake news in concept and fact has eroded the most important asset any media outlet has: its readers’ trust.
In February, 2020, along with warning of the impending COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) pandemic, the World Health Organization warned: “The 2019-nCoV outbreak and response has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ — an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”
Now, more than ever, informed and engaged communities are essential for a healthy democracy. Not just for conservatives, or liberals, or independents, but across the board.
A Pew Research study conducted from 2016 to 2017 found “Americans express only a moderate trust in most news source types.” That same study revealed an increase in the number of respondents who trust information from their own local news organization. This increase outpaced trust of information from sources of national news, friends, and family.
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