May 20, 2006
Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace residents working hard to identify top priorities for the next five years
With support from the Strong Neighborhoods Initiative and CommUniverCity, residents of Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace have identified a list of goals and voted on the top ten priorities for the next five years.

On Saturday, May 20^th, residents of the Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace convened once more to vote on major issues facing their community. Items surrounding themes such as education, housing, safe streets, and health topped off the list of 62 issues. The goal was to identify the top ten. The results of this project will be handed to the City of San José to determine how money allocated to the Strong Neighborhood will be spent.

The planning project is part of the CommUniverCity mission, the creation of service learning projects for students that meet neighborhood goals. Faculty members at San José State are matched with projects that address community–identified priorities. Through the goal–setting process, the students in the Urban Planning department at San José State University learned important lessons about community organization and added depth to their education while the neighborhood residents received support from students and faculty to help them organize themselves.

The students have invested two semesters into meeting with community leaders and hosting workshops. The result was 90 community members speaking out to City leaders and owning the changes happening all over their neighborhood.

While the final top ten priorities of the ballot may change as items are combined and completed, the concerns of the neighborhood are clear: health and access to healthcare, education, and safer, more walkable streets are priority.

The first voting process for Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace took place in December 2001. At that time the residents voted on 69 items. In the next five years the City of San José spent $88.8 million dollars improving items in that list which ranked of importance to community members. Eight of the top ten were completed by the time residents again voted on May 20^th.

This year, voter turnout more than doubled since 2001, from 34 to 90 ballots in 2006. As Ehtesham Khan, CommUniverCity volunteer, San José State student, and resident of Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace comments, “It’s great that so many more people took part in the voting process this year. Sometimes it looks like groups aren’t representative of the population, but seeing that both Spanish and English ballots were returned is an indication that it was a wider sample.”