The Office of Community Revitalization (OCR) has teamed up with Neighborhood Link, a national Internet-based community network, provide free, interactive Web sites where community groups and organizations can share ideas online with residents, county commissioners, school officials and police.
“We believe that Neighborhood Link will allow us to maintain complete lists of all neighborhood associations or groups in our Countywide Community Revitalization Team areas,” said OCR Director Houston Tate. “We hope it will make it easier for Palm Beach County to communicate with neighborhoods and for neighborhoods to communicate with each other.”
The unique service is being offered for the first time in Palm Beach County and helps neighborhood and community organizations keep in touch and informed about issues affecting their communities. The goal of the partnership is to bring people together within their neighborhoods, offering residents a chance to build a stronger sense of community and a closer link to the local civic community.
Neighborhood Link's focus is on community, home, and family. Once residents or community groups sign up, they will be given a Neighborhood Coordinator access, which will allow users to access the site to provide and obtain useful information regarding events and meeting schedules, important notices, their group's newsletter, local school listings, connections to the Sheriff's Office, community newspapers, interactive maps, additional pages for special-interest groups, interactive discussion areas and much more.
The Web site will give neighbors the ability to create faxable forms that will allow them to instantly send faxes directly from the Web sites. Forms can be created and used to start petitions, send messages to the local newspaper, or simply communicate with any fax machine in the area. They will even have the ability to create links to fax machines at their district police station, enabling anyone to fax information (such as anonymous crime tips) directly to appropriate authorities.
Neighborhood Link has been programmed to make it very simple and fast for neighborhoods to maintain their Web sites. The neighborhood sites are maintained using simple Web forms into which information can be typed or copied and pasted. These Web pages are automatically created or updated.
Here is a sample of one site that has been already created: Royal Palm Estates Neighborhood Association. A stronger neighborhood is just 15 minutes away!
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