CBEL Graduates with Honors
Written by Tim Buckley, December 2024
The Community Business and Education Leaders (CBEL) Collaborative was conceived and nourished for years by Mountain West Investment Corporation. It is now a self-standing nonprofit organization, with an office on north Portland Road.
The diverse Executive Committee that was assembled to guide CBEL’s work with Neighborhood Family Councils has now become our Board of Directors. A list of those talented and dedicated people is listed below.
When CBEL began in 2019, it was only an idea. Two hundred leaders gathered to discuss models to support Salem-Keizer families and teachers to provide a world class education for our community’s children.
Dr. Wendy Ellis, director of the national Building Community Resilience Center at George Washington University, was on hand at that meeting. Her model for Building Community Resilience by addressing what she calls the Pair of Aces, Adverse Childhood Experiences occurring in Adverse Community Environments, was adopted as one of the key CBEL Frameworks.
The work began by developing and supporting the Hallman Neighborhood Family Council. The council was responsible for listening to the voices of their neighbors and promoting five key Strengthening Families Protective Factors. The protective factors are:
Positive Social Connections
Tangible Support in Times of Need
Knowledge of child development and parenting skills.
Parental Resilience
Social and Emotional Development of Children
Today there are five Neighborhood Family Councils, and that number will expand to 8 by the end of 2025. The science behind this work says that when all Salem and Keizer’s neighborhoods are rich in the Strengthening Families Protective Factors parental stress will decrease from toxic to tolerable, or even healthy, levels. This allows parents to move from day-to-day survival to protecting and nurturing their children’s safety, health and learning.
In our five neighborhoods, social cohesion is the first measure of growth. Cohesion is measured in increased trust and the mutual support of neighbors. From cohesion, social capital is built. Without these two things, lasting growth is unlikely to occur.
What started with half a dozen neighborhood family council members now numbers over 30. What began with a handful of community nonprofit organizations as partners now numbers more than 50. The number of volunteers now numbers into the hundreds. And the number of neighbors impacted by these events numbers into the many thousands. And these increases have occurred with nearly the same number of CBEL staff members as when there was only one NFC. The value of volunteer contributions in the past 4 years exceeds $200,000.
The CBEL board of directors includes:
Please join us in whatever way you find useful and attractive as we expand into more neighborhoods. Come work, play and celebrate with us as we play out our winning hand against the Pair of ACEs in Salem and Keizer. Jim Seymour, CBEL director, often quotes Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, “We’re not in this to help a few kids beat the odds; we’re here to change the odds.” By that, he means that every child in our city should grow up in a safe, stable, nurturing home, enjoy good health, succeed in school and go on in life to become financially self-sufficient.
“Our neighborhood families are the solution,” he added, “not the problem. That’s why we’ve made it our goal to amplify the voices of neighborhood residents to effect lasting change at a local level.”