Community-sourced indicators for public safety
Integrating community expertise into public safety reform.
At the Possibility Lab, we believe that the people closest to social problems are also closest to their solutions, and that the policy process works best when policymakers, researchers, and those with lived experience work hand-in-hand.
Partner:
City of Oakland Department of Violence Prevention; Oakland Community-Based Organizations
funder:
California Community Foundation: California 100
Resources
other Firsthand Framework projects:
Oakland - Community Sourced Indicators for Safety
Community-sourced indicators for immigrant and worker health
Community-sourced indicators for supportive housing
Since 2021, the Possibility Lab has been working alongside a diverse group of policymakers and community organizations to integrate residents’ voices into policy design, implementation, and evaluation, using a process we call the Firsthand Framework for Policy Innovation. The Firsthand Framework’s methodology gathers rich, qualitative expertise from communities and uses it to generate quantitative indicators, which can then be used to identify, pilot, and evaluate reforms that authentically represent community perspectives and priorities.
Oakland - Community Sourced Indicators for Safety
In the City of Oakland, the Possibility Lab team worked with six organizational partners to collect over 500 “firsthand indicators” of community safety, drawn from thirty-three focus groups and town halls across nine distinct communities. These discussions brought together hundreds of residents representing many of the city's diverse communities that have been most directly affected by crime and violence: Black, Latinx, and AAPI residents, immigrant families and refugees, systems-impacted youth, and more.
Explore our interactive multimedia website.
Inland Empire - Community Sourced Indicators for Immigrant and Worker Health
In the Inland Empire, the Possibility Lab team worked with TODEC Legal Center to highlight urgent health challenges confronting farm, warehouse, and service workers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The report uses the “firsthand indicators” and provides a comprehensive look at how economic stability, healthcare access, and overall well-being are intertwined for these essential workers. The insights that emerged from the Firsthand Framework’s participatory process shine a spotlight on the rich and nuanced ways that these communities experience and talk about their health. In addition to physical and mental health, participants spoke about how their health was connected to economic stability, access to health services, education, and discrimination.
Explore the micrositeBay Area - Community Sourced Indicators for Supportive Housing
This project examines how people experiencing homelessness in the Bay Area define and understand "life success." Together with program participants from LifeMoves and Bay Area Community Services (BACS), two leading housing and supportive service CBOs, we are co-creating client-informed indicators of success. These indicators will then be refined with input from client councils and partners, enabling LifeMoves and BACS to use the indicators to: (1) identify new opportunities for intervention or change, and (2) collect new metrics for future program evaluation.
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