As students and community members voice their concerns surrounding new Temple President John Fry’s history with community relations and alleged gentrification, the university is continuing to familiarize local residents about its “Community Gateway.”
The Temple Community Gateway, opened last semester, is a physical hub on Cecil B. Moore Avenue near 15th Street geared toward helping local North Central community members access education, youth programs and health resources. The university also hopes it can help consolidate community programming and investment.
While at Drexel in 2014, Fry introduced the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships in University City, but developed a large part of the area for university housing and businesses, overtaking spaces in which community members went to school or worked.
With the Gateway in its infancy, the leaders of the program hope to bridge that resource gap for North Central residents. Antonio Romero, director of Temple Community Gateway, called the program a “dream come true.”
“It’s a place where we can cultivate a level of community cohesion, both internally within the university and externally throughout the neighborhoods,” Romero said. “[Where we can] erode away some of the real and perceived barriers that may have been a deterrent to our connection to humanity.”
Shelbie Ulysse, violence prevention and community engagement coordinator, said the Gateway is also part of a longstanding mission of the university to reduce gun violence in the community.
At the beginning of the semester, Romero and a group of “navigators,” who go to tabling events and community meetings, canvassed around the Cecil B. Moore Avenue strip to businesses and homes telling people about the Gateway.
Through the Gateway’s website, users can fill out a form to indicate interest in different services, like mental health resources, youth and summer programs, art and music programs and adult education.
There are at least 400 programs in the Gateway database, Ulysse said.
Valerie Harrison, Temple’s vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion and community impact, said that lack of education and economic opportunities is the root of many social issues, from poverty to crime.
Social disorganization, a popular criminology theory developed in the early 1900s, states that the environment itself is what decides the crime rate, rather than the people and the demographics of the area. The theory states that in order to address crime, the area must be changed with social integration and improving education.
“Social disconnection hinders economic mobility and therefore connections across income levels, across educational levels is important for greater economic mobility,” Harrison said. “So fundamental to an effective community is opportunity creation, and access.”
With the Gateway still in its first year, Ulysse hopes that the entire North Central community will learn about the resources Temple offers. For a child interested in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field, the Community Gateway could connect the parents to someone who knows more about different programs or education centers, Harrison said.
The leaders of the Gateway also want to provide residents with resources after they’re incarcerated, like helping them with transportation, transitional housing or any kind of financial resources for food and personal items, Harrison said.
Ulysse also emphasized the role of community, education and financial literacy in congruence with violence prevention efforts. With community engagement coordinators at Temple’s 17 different colleges and schools, the Gateway hopes to centralize all of the violence prevention resources for the coordinators to utilize if a community member asks.
The 19121 and 19122 zip codes, where Main Campus is located, saw 64 shootings this year as of Dec. 2, according to the Office of the Controller.
“[It was created] to address what is needed for a community to feel empowered and also be autonomous,” Ulysse said. “Receiving resources not only addresses a lot of social determinants of health, but it also can really reduce the amount of violence.”
In a time when diversity, equity and inclusion programs have become a hot-button issue in American politics, Harrison encourages people to remember the North Central residents and their stories. She wants the Gateway to be used as a support system for residents and their families from a child’s birth to when they receive education and beyond.
“Temple has enjoyed a really long and significant history of care and concern for its neighbors, but it has not always been easy to access all of these programs because they haven’t been coordinated,” Harrison said. “You can go on the website and try to figure it out. We have everything from preschool programs to youth engagement, middle school, academic enrichment programs to high school dual enrollment programs to job and workforce training.”
Evelyn Blower contributed reporting.
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