Black Group Staging Community Drive

Hundreds of churchgoers from more than 50 churches in Southeast San Diego plan to give up their Sunday this week to spend the afternoon knocking on doors for the first Save our Children and Community Campaign.

The door-to-door campaign to tell residents about job training, housing assistance, health care and drug-abuse counseling is designed to help people help one another, said Frank Jordan, spokesman for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in San Diego.

Organizers of the campaign “felt we needed to do more than just march” to help the community, Jordan said.

“The NAACP is a civil rights organization, but we’re also a people organization. Our major enemies are not just racism but those things destroying the fabric of the family--crime and drug abuse. We need to show people we care.”

The campaign, six months in the making, is the first step in an outreach program planned by the Metropolitan Fellowship Foundation in San Diego, Jordan said. The nonprofit group is headed by the Rev. Willie E. Manley, pastor of the Greater Life Baptist Church, and includes Curtis Moring, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, members of the clergy, professionals and business people.

“It is the first time the clergy, and business and professional people have really come together in a substantive way,” Manley said. “Our goal is to bring about change in our community by working together with the community.”

The people involved are doing it because it is the right thing to do, Jordan said. “None are getting paid and none are on a government grant.”

Each of the more than 50 participating churches will take a one-block radius around the church and go door to door with the message: “We are your friends and your neighbors. How can we begin working as a team in this community,” Jordan said.

The measurement of the campaign’s success will be how many residents offer suggestions to help the community and how many phone calls and referrals the churches and community groups receive about job training and drug-abuse counseling, Manley said.

The foundation’s priorities also include working for affordable housing and attracting businesses to help the community become self-sustaining.

“Several developers have said we’d be happy to invest in your community if you had some way to invest in your community. The foundation is an opportunity for them to come forth and put their money where their mouth is,” he said.

“We’re also looking into developing some land into a senior citizens’ community with health care and assisted-living facilities. We feel we have the political clout and community support to put it together.”

The state’s liquor laws that prohibit selling alcohol to minors need to be enforced, and the community needs to offer young people job training and placement as an alternative to drugs and crime, Jordan said. “We have to get back to the basics.”

Replacing the yellow street lights with clear bulbs in high-crime areas of Southeast San Diego would go a long way toward making the streets safer, he said.

The yellow lights were intended to help astronomers on Mt. Palomar see stars light-years away, Jordan said, but people are afraid to walk the streets because they can’t see well. “There’s got to be some common sense here.”