What does safety look like to Milwaukee's northwest-side residents? African American Roundtable is asking them.

The community nonprofit organization African American Roundtable wants Milwaukee's northwest-side residents to reimagine what safety looks like in their communities.

And it wants them to help redefine the concept of safety.

The group held the first of its "visioning sessions" recently at Havenwoods State Forest . The session aimed to activate residents' senses to see what a thriving northwest side would look, feel, taste, smell and sound like.

One key message:

“Police don’t equal safety,” said Ryeshia Farmer, AART’s community programs manager.

AART has been vocal about shifting city money away from policing. With all that Milwaukee invests in police each year, Farmer said, “people still don’t feel safe in their communities.”

In fact, she said, people view police as the opposite of safety because they can escalate a situation or produce harm or violence themselves.

“We are spending too much of our tax dollars on that for that to be the case,” Farmer said. “So, we have an opportunity to say, ‘OK, if police don’t equate safety — and we can feel that in our own personal experiences — then let’s think about what we can do to feel safe.’”

Safety, she said, can be well-lit streets, clean parks, neighborhood block clubs or people getting to know their neighbors. Those things don’t require police.

“So, we are inviting folks to think about all the other ways the northwest side could be safe," Farmer said, "And the input we get from their thinking, their imagining, helps to illuminate what the campaign looks like.

“It could be any number of different things, but the community is going to tell us what that looks like."

The campaign, which AART hopes to launch next summer, can build off work people are already doing, Farmer said.

In 2019, AART led a successful citywide initiative to get more residents to understand and be engaged in the city’s budgeting process through its LiberateMKE campaign .

More: Liberate MKE campaign calls for diverting police funds into violence prevention, jobs, housing

This time, AART is focusing on one area of Milwaukee.

"We chose the northwest side because we noticed that, while lots of organizing work happens in areas across the city, not many are engaging northwest-siders consistently over time or helping them to build their power," Farmer said.

The organization invested $40,000 of its own money to fund community-driven projects to illustrate how investing city money through participatory budgeting can address community issues, especially on the northwest side.

The locale of the recent visioning session figures significantly in getting residents to reimagine their community.

Havenwoods is the state’s only urban forest. But it wasn’t always this lush green space people have come to know. Previously, its 237 acres of forest was the site of a jail, then an Army base that included a missile site, and then a city landfill.

That changed when a vocal group of residents, community leaders and public officials banded together to turn the land into what it is now.

“If neighbors organized to replace that military base, that prison, with a park, what can we learn from that?” Farmer said. “What can that teach us about the possibilities for a thriving northwest side, especially as we investigate this question of what does safety look like outside of police?”

The next visioning session is 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Oct. 26. For more information, go to bit.ly/visioningsesh .

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What does safety look like to Milwaukee's northwest-side residents? African American Roundtable is asking them.