Bridgeport residents help Fairfield U. tackle gun violence
FAIRFIELD — Vanessa Liles wants Bridgeport public housing residents to understand the community — and the power — they have at home.
That was part of Liles' message to the dozens who sat before her the night of March 28 at Fairfield University during a community conversation encouraging residents of Bridgeport public housing to embrace where they live, despite the sometimes-negative reputation of these facilities.
“We've been in the process of building community power, and once a community realizes the level of power that it owns, then it is more capable of taking care of itself,” said Liles, a coproject director with PT Partners — a community group serving the P.T. Barnum Apartments in Bridgeport. “And therefore it's more capable of restricting and limiting not only the nuisance behaviors, but the violent behaviors and the threats to safety within the community.”
Liles is part of a team that will work with public housing residents in a three-year research project to build gun violence solutions from the ground up. Community conversations, like the one Liles led, and a survey of more than 3,000 public housing residents were part of the first phase of the project, which began at the start of the year with a $1 million grant from the Tow Foundation, a New Canaan-based charity that invests in underserved communities.
PT Partners has teamed up with a youthbased nonprofit in the city and Fairfield University's Center for Social Impact to research causes of and solutions to gun violence with the residents at the P.T. Barnum Apartments, Charles F. Greene Homes and Trumbull Gardens. Its name, “Amplifying Resident Voices,” offers some insight into the community-based approach that project leaders hope will make public housing safer and break down the stigma that can sometimes surround it.
“I think there's a lot of assumptions in the public discourse about — the residents are creating their own situation based on who they are, that if you're poor, if you're living in public housing, meaning that it's by definition, all people living who are impoverished, that they are making poor decisions, that they are enacting violence upon themselves,” Liles said. “And that is an absolute falsehood.”
PT Partners has already hosted a dozen community focus groups with about 375 residents and other community allies and partners, but the March 28 event was the second under the longterm research project. Instead of diving into gun violence or critical safety issues, the session focused on the bright spots of the community inside public housing facilities, encouraging residents to embrace the bonds between one other.
But experts did not shy away from discussing ways that public housing could be improved.
Melissa Quan, the director of the Center for Social Impact at Fairfield University, said part of the answer can start with infrastructure upgrades as simple as more lighting or repaired elevators so public housing complexes can feel safer. She said a missing sense of safety can leave parents fearful for their children and those children accustomed to a proximity to violence.
“It's part of life, you know?” Quan said of the common thinking among some young people who grow up around public housing. “What is there was there to do about it?”
Dione Dwyer, who lives in the PT Barnum Apartments and will help coordinate upcoming conversations, said with more outlets for the community to make a positive difference, residents say safety will follow. She said teen and adult programs, parenting classes, tutoring, sports, extracurricular opportunities and community space for gatherings can deliver those results, but public housing officials have failed to follow through.
“We always hear them say there's not much options for the kids to do something safe, no real programs or..something impactful, an alternative that's better for them than just hanging around wasting time, something for them to focus on so that it's less idling around and soliciting and all that, something for the kids to do to keep them focused and stay off the streets and not encourage stuff like that,” Dwyer said.
Input from residents like Hamilton and Dwyer will inform the next phase of the research project — developing and implementing measures meant to alleviate the risk factors of gun violence. Marc Donald — the executive director of the Regional Youth Adult Social Action Partnership, the youthbased Bridgeport nonprofit on the research team — said RYASAP's longstanding preventative work through street- and school-based programs helped bring the research team together. The nonprofit will play a critical role in creating the solutions that evolve from the surveys in the first phase of the project, according to a Fairfield University release.
The research team plans to work alongside leaders from the Bridgeport public housing facilities, local police, housing officials and health professionals to ensure the project's solutions become systemic.
Liles and Hamilton see those systems as broken for Bridgeport's public housing community as the result of top-down decision-making, which they hope to reverse in the coming years.
“A lot of the assumption is that the Housing Authority should be taking care of the needs of the residents in that way, the police should be taking care of the needs of the residents, the health care system, the education system, and they're failing,” Liles said. “They're failing this community. So the community has to realize its own power and ability to do that, and hold those systems accountable.”