By Abdul-Hakim Shabazz

With the city of Indianapolis starting off the year on track for its worse murder rate in history and local lawmakers still trying to work out the details of a public safety summit, we here at Indy Politics decided to it was time to take some of initiative on our end.

If you’re a community group or organization, or you know someone, that deals with crime, its root causes, effects or you specialize in crime prevention, we’d love to showcase your work by publishing what you’re doing in hopes that different groups can learn from each other.

Here’s what we need from you

  1. The name of your group or organization
  2. A general description of what you do.
  3. A general description of your program, including your target demographic that you work with.
  4. Two or three specifics examples of the successes you have had.
  5. Any info you can share regarding the costs associated with your program.
  6. Contact information so other groups can get ahold of you.
  7. Any other information you think might be helpful.

Try to keep all your info confined to a one-page, 12-point font document so it’s easy to digest.

Our goal is to compile all of this information in a PDF, so it can be downloaded for other groups to reference.

And by doing so, we think we can bring down silos and get folks talking to each other as the city tries to figure out what it’s doing.

The deadline will be next Saturday, February 22,  and whatever we get, we will publish, within reason of course.

We’ve had approximately 32 murders in this town so far, we didn’t hit that number last year until April.  And on top of that, we’re on track for more than 240 murders by the end of the year, that’s the most in Indianapolis’ history.

We can no longer afford to wait for the city to start doing what we should be doing for ourselves.

E-mail your info to abdul@indypolitics.org.

Abdul is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.Org, a state of Indiana Certified Minority Business Enterprise.  He is also licensed to practice law in Indiana and Illinois.  His opinions are his own, but you’re free to adopt if you choose.