Harvard fellow visiting Portsmouth to help tackle youth violence issues
PORTSMOUTH — There’s a Harvard grad lurking around City Hall. And city leaders hope she has some wicked good ideas.
Portsmouth is one of 38 cities across the globe participating in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. And by the end of the year, the city hopes the Harvard fellow working with Portsmouth will provide leaders with innovative ideas for tackling youth violence.
Since 2017, the Bloomberg Harvard program has provided leadership and management training to mayors and senior city officials to help local governments grow and lead more effectively.
Mayor Shannon Glover said he visited New York City in October after the city was selected. He spent a few days receiving training, learning about what issues other cities are facing and networking with mayors from around the world.
Glover said while other cities grapple with housing and the effects of climate change, Portsmouth’s top priority is youth violence.
The program, at no cost to the city, includes a fellow who embeds themselves in local government for 10 weeks before making recommendations. Nicah Santos, 28, arrived in mid-June. She plans to present all her findings and suggestions to the city council during its Aug. 9 work session.
Santos, an educator from the Philippines, recently graduated from Harvard with a goal of addressing educational gaps for low-to-middle income families. For this program, Santos said Portsmouth appealed to her because she wants to work on youth-related issues.
Santos is working closely with a core team of city leaders who meet weekly to discuss how the city can best pool its resources to address violence.
The team is led by Fire Chief Nestor Manguba and includes representation from the police, sheriff’s office, parks and recreation and behavioral health departments, along with the city’s housing authority, civic leagues and grassroots organizers.
“What really attracted me to Portsmouth’s description of their problem was that they called it a whole community approach to reducing youth gun violence,” Santos said. “And that idea of public-private partnership and pulling a community together, that really appealed to me.”
Santos said she’s spent her days analyzing crime, schools and neighborhood data along with literature about best practices for addressing violence. She’s also interviewed and connected with grassroots and organizational leaders. She hopes to map out all the city’s available programs and the agencies that are addressing community needs and make suggestions about how such resources could be shared or redirected to be more effective.
“We know that saying, ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’” Santos said. “I see it at work here in a way that I don’t see it work in other places. I feel that there’s more of a focus here to be coordinated and share resources. That’s the approach I want to strengthen when talking about gun violence in Portsmouth.”
The city has already put at least one possible solution into motion. Last week, Portsmouth launched its Roc the Block initiative, in which staff from numerous city departments focus on a different neighborhood each month to address issues such as mental health, neighborhood maintenance and getting youth involved in more extracurricular programs.
It’s currently working with the Prentis Park neighborhood.
“We don’t get to be the community we desire to be without those people,” Glover said. “So I encourage everyone to get involved, to get engaged, to participate in making your city what you desire it to be.”