Rich Weiss – Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

May 6, 2021May 10, 2021

Community members needed to join fifth Cleveland Consent Decree Community Conversation sponsored by NAACP- Cleveland Chapter and United Way of Greater Cleveland: 6:00 pm, May 12

By Rich Weiss, for Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

If you missed your chance to attend the April 15^th public input meeting on the Cleveland Police Consent Decree, your input is still needed for the upcoming Consent Decree Community Conversation at 6:00 pm on May 12 (on Zoom). This public meeting (co-sponsored by the local chapters of the United Way and NAACP) seeks your opinions and questions on progress of the Cleveland Division of Police in the areas of Crisis Intervention and Officer Wellness.

According to Roger Smith, Administrator of Cleveland’s Office of Professional Standards, “It’s really what the grassroots wants that should be driving this train. It’s important for public figures and people who work in public agencies to understand with clarity what it is the community wants, here—what role they want the police to play in their communities and what kind of rules do they want to govern those interactions. The only way to find that out is to get it from the community.”

November 18, 2020December 8, 2020

Rather than ‘flatten the curve’ it is time to ‘crush the curve’

This story was sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative, which is composed of 20-plus Northeast Ohio news outlets including Profile News Ohio and several other Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland member outlets.

by Rich Weiss and Julia Bejjani

The colder weather has brought with it the predicted spike in new coronavirus cases to the State of Ohio—and the rest of the world—as we all gather more closely, indoors.

In recent weeks, news about vaccine trial progress has brought hope to a coronavirus pandemic-weary global population—particularly those coping with the loss of family, friends, and colleagues to the lethal virus.

The fatigue of this pandemic, mixed with a seemingly insurmountable surge in new cases this fall, plus the hope of vaccines on the horizon, all together could lull us into relaxing our fight to contain coronavirus just as we reach our most dangerous levels of community spread.

Jade Khalife, MD, MPH, MSc., health systems practitioner and researcher for Lebanon’s Joint Health Systems Research project, is arguing that the time is now for Lebanon—and the world—to replicate a set of coronavirus containment policies, called, “crushing the curve,” which show better results than the more widely adopted “flattening the curve” policies.