Community Safety Initiative

CDI’s Community Safety Initiative (CSI) was a new approach to building community safety which brought residents, Gardaí, local authority and other stakeholders together to develop and implement community safety activities that aimed to identify and address the factors that negatively impact on the community’s experience of safety.

It arose from the initial research undertaken by CDI which identified safety as a major issue impacting negatively on the wellbeing of needs of children and families in Tallaght West.

The CSI aimed to:

  • Build on and integrate current community, Garda and local authority initiatives;
  • Ensure that community residents are actively involved in guiding its focus;
  • Use participatory methodologies to develop the CSI;
  • To implement activities that improve community safety.

Through this co-operative initiative, it was expected that strong community engagement would both improve residents’ perceptions of safety and help to reduce anti-social behaviour and crime at local neighbourhood level.

The first phase of the CSI (from 2008 – 2011) was independently evaluated by the Child and Family Research Centre at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), who found that the overall objectives of the CSI were not achieved during this timeframe.  The NUIG Evaluation report is available below.  Phase two, which involved work to test the CSI Manual and to mainstream best practice from the implementation of the CSI, was independently evaluated by the Dublin Institute of Technology.

The Safe and Healthy Place was an initiative within the CSI which brought together agencies and the community to address issues with a new estate in Tallaght West that was in need of essential services.  The Steering Committee met and worked together for two years and the evaluation of the CSI found that “Collaboration under the Safe and Healthy Place” initiative was identified by a majority of participating service providers as giving structure and focus to service provision in a new estate and as having helped to broaden the capacity of local service providers to support local children and families.” (Kearns et al. 2013).

CSI Evaluation Report and Policy Brief

CSI Manual

CDI published a Manual on the CSI programme.

CSI information for download.

For more information please contact Claire Casey on claire@cdi.ie