The Oklahoma Eagle

By Kevin Matthews
Guest Contributor

Imagine this:  Young people in north Tulsa being employed by their neighbors to clean up their own neighborhoods and helping the Senior Citizens with chores they aren’t physically able to do. Imagine north Tulsa having a private security force assisting the Tulsa Police Department patrolling neighborhoods to reduce burglaries and crime.  Imagine young people being trained to secure their own neighborhoods while making them cleaner and friendlier. The streets full of crime, drugs, theft, and violence have taken the lives and even the very souls of many of our young people today, but we can beat these streets. Cooperative economics is the solution for our community today.

This simple yet powerful effort requires each of our neighborhoods to be organized as an association in cooperation with the City of Tulsa and the neighborhood watch program.  We then have every neighborhood to list the young people in their neighborhood from ages 10-20 years old, as well as Senior Citizens age 65 and greater.
Next we will gain donations of only five dollars per household to employ the youth in our own neighborhoods to assist with cutting lawns of vacant homes and elderly prioritized by the neighborhood association.

These young people supervised by capable adults would also be able to paint numbers on curbs to enhance safety for emergency vehicle identification and small chores like raking leaves, picking up limbs, and trash, etc…also designated and prioritized by the association. With a neighborhood area of 600 households this would create three thousand dollars per month of which one third could be used to fund private security from a company like Dean Finley’s North Star Security in cooperation with Tulsa Police.
Dean and I have a relationship with Tulsa Job Corps Center which trains security personnel free of charge and internships are available through his company.

This cooperative effort would allow for informal employment opportunities for our youth with recurring funding for as little as five dollars a month from all of us. These young people would build relationships in their neighborhoods with older neighbors they may never have interacted with in the past. We build new trusting relationships, and we can hire, train, encourage, and police our own with a little collective cooperation.
We can beat these streets!!! This initiative is scheduled to launch by January 1, 2008.

To be a part of the solution call us at our office—Kevin Matthews, Networks FBLNT 250 E. Apache Re: Beat the Streets-955-2283 or 582-9675, info@kevinmatthews2008.com