When people call 911, they want to know they’ll be met with an empathetic response – one that meets the needs of their emergency, rather than escalating the situation.
This past weekend, 12 local elected officials and 7 community partners gathered in Pittsburgh for the weekend to launch Local Progress and Local Progress Impact Lab’s first ever Community Responder Cohort. Local Progress members from a range of localities, including Beacon, NY, Duluth, MN, and Nashville, TN, all came together for a common interest, to learn more about community responder programs, how they work, and how their locality might start to create one of these programs. The Cohort was hosted by LP member and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato.
Hundreds of cities across the country have adopted community responder programs – these programs allow unarmed, trained civilians to respond to concerns like mental health emergencies, noise complaints, wellness checks and more. These programs are popular and have already seen success: answering thousands of emergency calls and redefining what safety looks like.
Over the past couple days, LP members met with the A-Team, Allegheny County’s community responder program to learn the inner workings of program operations and toured the County’s Emergency Operations Center where members got a behind the scenes look at the 911 dispatch center. Over the next couple months, they will dig deep into the ins and outs of what makes a community responder program successful – from getting community buy-in to financing to developing data collection and analysis. By the end of the cohort, they will be equipped with tools to start introducing programs in their own localities.
Stay tuned to hear how the cohort evolves and what members take away from it. Together, we can reimagine what public safety looks like and create a world where everyone has what they need to thrive.
