To those of whom sent me emails talking about their experiences in terms of challenges with working with your communities, I am grateful. It seems most of you have good experiences - particularly in making connections with your police forces and business groups.

I am pretty challenged to write this article for the European group, and will try to focus on the appproaches you folks have made in terms of building bridges. Chaco, in particular, gave me a nice snap shot of their systematic approach. I am including it at the bottom of this email.


If any of you have anything else to add - I would be very, very grateful.

Jim
www.streetmedicine.org



From Chaco:

Our organization has 15 years of outreach experience targeting homeless, drug users, comercial sex workers and drop outs kids. The experience is very positive, ocassionaly we have encounter some opposition specially from the police force and from some kind of religious groups. We has deal with this opposition in differents ways. In general terms, we use the media to justified our presence in the streets, we do a mapping section in which we try to build a relationship with community leaders, community stakeholders, local police, commerce in general and we always try to build an informal network with local people. We also try to know everything thats important to the place (events, critical situations, birthdays and so on), them we establish a very formal schedule of visits. The police or any other agency will be aware that our intervention will result in conduct modification that will affect in a positive way their job. With our consistency, the community recgonized that we are "one of the players" and not an outsider. Police or any represive force will be more carefull in the way they intervene with us because the community will protect us.

Chaco