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LEAD-IN BY HOST SHALINI TRIPATHI: Local man Charles X. White is trying to find a way to make communities safer and more effective. With more, here's Josh Gajewski.

STORY: Juvenile crime, teenage delinquency and parent apathy: those are just a few of the recurring problems Charles X. White is tired of hearing about.

"You will see the landscape of those problems being reduced by civic engagement at the neighborhood level."

White's Millennium Neighborhood Project focuses on three things: improving public health and safety data collection, saving lives in emergency situations and coordinating service responses. White wants to implement programs and workshops to inform and train as many people in a given community as possible. And he plans to use surveys to determine which neighborhood residents would be able to serve as volunteers and which residents would need help during a natural disaster.

"What the Millennium Neighborhood Project is designed to do is to create an entire new service delivery system, maintained and managed at the neighborhood level, which this is not being done currently. The model of social service that is being normally referred to in America and in Houston right now is a model that had been created in practice for over 100 years and it's time to change it, adjust it, or upgrade it in this new millennium."

The project got its unofficial start on Sept. 7 when White coordinated volunteers from local universities along with various Houston city council members to hold a free emergency and disaster citizens' workshop at Sterling High School. But in order to implement the more comprehensive city-wide plan that White envisions, governmental funding might be needed.

U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a strong advocate of White's program, is seeking roughly $1.6 million in federal funding for the project.

"The excitement of it of course is the ability to not ignore the local community when you talk about security and engage all these thoughtful minds that are here."

The project is currently using volunteers from five universities including the University of Houston, Rice University and Texas Southern University. White says that he hopes more governmental officials buys into his idea.

"What we're asking the technical assistance group, which is the government, is to not give us a one-hour workshop, but to be a part of ongoing technical assistance training for stakeholders who hold leadership positions but do not go to leadership seminars. That will upgrade the quality of leaders that are at the neighborhood level by upgrading their information."

White says that this proposal for federal funding includes about $700,000 going directly to approximately 60 different groups in 60 different neighborhoods across 22 different zip codes in the area. One of them is the Sunnyside Civic Club in South Houston.

"If we institutionalize, formulize and codify certain norms that are in any and every community, you have organized a community to a degree that has been never organized before and that is the heard and the core of what we have put together with the Millennium Neighborhood Project."

Josh Gajewski, KPFT News, Houston.

E-mail Josh Gajewski at Mecougar@mail.uh.edu .