CHEER Mission

CHEER's goal surrounding Public Safety is centered around creating a solid working relationship between the Long Branch Community, and the MCPD District 3. This relationship's main purpose is to sanction a greater policing presence in the community. This overall serves the purpose of increasing the trust and the satisfaction with the police service, and also address issues surrounding school safety, and bullying on schools and school busses. This goal is planned to be set from 6-12 months, with the overall objective to launch a Youth Advisory Program that is currently a program in district 4. 

CHEER's goals surrounding Neighborhood Attractiveness aims to create a more physically attractive community that represents the vast, unique community members. Some of the objectives include design changes to make roads safer for pedestrians, reducing the amount of litter, and conducting surveys to neighborhood residents to determine which aspects of their community they seek to change. This is an ongoing goal within CHEER that will continue to aim towards diffusing information to community members on proposed changes, designs, and opportunities for public comment. 

CHEER's goal on the topic of affordable housing is to provide more affordable units for current renters and low income homeowners. Plans include creating a tenant association that provides residents and community leaders with information on how to address policy options and property redevelopment. This is also followed by plans on collaborating with MHP, AIM, and CASA to provide residents with informaiton on how tenants could purchase and maintain affordable buildings under first refusal. This is an ongoing goal that will aim to build leadership capacity among Long Branch tenants as well as residents to advocate more on affordable housing. 

CHEER's main goal on parking is to be able to provide more parking availability for mutlifamily resident buildings. This is to overall ensure the community is involved on future parking decisions in business areas. As an ongoing plan, CHEER aims to gather data on the parking needs of multifamily buildings; work with different organizations such as, "Action in Montgomery," to press concerns of residents and businesses about parking, and to ensure decisions made are focused on family. 

CHEER's affordable businesses goal aims to maintain and increase the variety and affordability of goods and services found in the Long Branch community. As an ongoing timeline, CHEER wants to be able to survey businesses along with their customers to obtain certain measurements. In the longer run they strive to, reduce the cost of tax and other financial incentives, and provide training skills in accounting and business planning to help start-ups. This will then turn into annual survey's being given out to track the number of business failures compared to new businesses, and will overall develop better relations with businesses and nearby neighborhood associations.

CHEER's goal surrounding equitable food is to provide access to spaces for food growing that is experienced in the community. Some measures include plans on changing zoning regulations so that residential structures can experience new forms of agriculture in rooftop gardens. This also includes discovering more ways to grow and distribute food throughout the community. In a 12 month timeframe, the overall goal will be to identify more green space for tenants to grow food, and also to work with elected officials to get budgeting for the planting and maintenance of trees.