The basic goal to promoting and maintaining a healthy, safe community is co-operation. People that you already know are likely to co-operate with you. You need to develop positive, respectful relations among members of your community by organizing social, recreational or outreach events that will provide opportunities for people to get to know each other and build respectful relationships.

Each of these types of events can be a one time event celebrating an occasion or to raise money for a specific purpose, or on-going events such as weekly family at the movie nights, teen drop-in, company anniversaries, etc…

With each event you develop you will find that it is impossible to gear your activities to meet the needs of all the members of the community; however you must ensure that all members have the opportunity to attend some of your events. The best way to ensure that the communities needs are being met is to find out what they want and plan your activities to meet their needs. Never try to plan the whole event yourself, the more you involve as many people as possible in some aspect of the planning, organizing, preparing and facilitating, the more likely your event will be judged a success.

Co-operation with others is at the root of all healthy communities and healthy communities encourage diversity among the members of the community. Like all aspects of life there are benefits and barriers to getting to know others.

Benefits: