People use the Internet to improve and advance their current status. For example, those who are unemployed are using the Internet to find jobs, and those with lower incomes and many minorities are using the Internet to take courses or do school research. The Internet is not only a source of information, communication, and entertainment, but also a tool that can help users help themselves.

   The Values and Strategies Committee, after discussions at meetings of the Human Services Committee and the Security Committee, proposes that the Council work toward a cooperative broadband wireless network to serve FPSE. The project should be designed to realize three principal interactive outcomes:

1. a majority of neighborhood residents and other stakeholders will participate in neighborhood governance;
2. neighbors will support community-oriented policing efforts with digitized video evidence of drug and drug-related street crime; and
3. children and adults will participate in literacy-, job-, and family-skills activities.

  The project should also stimulate the just-beginning economic revitalization of the neighborhood that follows decades of disinvestment.

   Forest Park Southeast Community Council and neighborhood human service providers should lead the project. The Metropolitan Police Department, Washington University, St. Louis Board of Education, and St. Louis Public Library could be additional partners.

  The innovative project can use a wireless broadband network managed and staffed by residents to bridge the digital divide that isolates neighbors from generally available opportunities. The residents will use the technology to participate in the neighborhood's activites, to secure their streets and homes against crime, and to improve their employment opportunities and to achieve family aspirations.

  As FPSE is a participant in the regional Sustainable Neighborhoods Initiative, efforts should be made to design and implement a network that can be replicated in the eight other neighborhoods participating in SNI.