Will Free Food Help?

It took a gift-card giveaway to lure people to respond to emails about Wooster Square’s management team meetings — and still not many showed up.

Andy Ross, who chairs the Wooster Square/Downtown Management Team, told that story Wednesday night to his fellow neighborhood organizers from around town. Some of them could sympathize.

The occasion was a citywide gathering at police headquarters of chairs of community management teams. Some neighborhoods, like Fair Haven and the East Shore, report consistent, strong attendance at their monthly meetings. Others, like Ross, are scraping to get neighbors to show up. Wednesday night they shared theories and suggestions.

The management teams came into existence 20 years ago at the dawn of community policing in New Haven. They bring neighbors together with their neighborhood cops at neighborhood substations in the city’s 10 policing districts to learn about crime trends and discuss local problems.

“I’m very frustrated,” Ross said Wednesday night. Before his team’s meetings, he said, he emails the 400 people on his listserve. ​“Nothing comes back,” he said. As few as one person, but never more than ten people turn up. ​“I end up having more people that are presenting than I have people to present to.”

Last December, Ross planned a holiday party for the neighborhood. Again, no one responded. He threw the party anyways and invited his friends and family. One person from the neighborhood showed up.

“Am I just talking to the wall?” Ross asked. ​“Is there no one out there? Like E.T.?”

In an effort to up attendance, Ross has started including an offer in his emails: Just respond and you will be entered into a drawing to win a gift card to a local business.

“Golly, it got ​‘em going” he said. The number of email responses jumped from zero to 130. Next month, Ross is throwing a party at his house to hand out the prizes to their winners.

So why aren’t more people coming?

Ross and others Wednesday offered some theories:

• Poor marketing. People don’t even know that management teams exist. Let alone know when or where they take place. The New Haven police department publicizes the meetings on its website, but some of the times and days of the week are outdated. Some chairs said some people no longer receive a ​“flash sheet” informing management teams about other teams’ meetings.

• Competition. Block-watch meetings — separate groups covering smaller stretches of neighborhoods — can make attending management team meetings feel redundant.

• Diverse neighborhoods. Some management teams, like on the East Shore and Ross’s Wooster Square/Downtown, merge distinct neighborhoods. ​“Wooster Square could care less what happens Downtown, and Downtown could care less what happens in Wooster Square,” Ross said.

• Little help from elected officials. In some neighborhoods, people said, aldermen often don’t show or reply to requests that they send reports if they can’t make the meetings. (In others, aldermen do attend regularly.)

• No problems. Ohan Karagozian of the Hill suggested that maybe neighbors don’t have any pressing concerns.

Not all neighborhoods report scant turnouts.

East Shore usually draws 30 people. ​“We’re in East Shore where a lot of people are retired, so this is their social life,” noted Chair Barbara Carroll.

Fair Haven gets a fair turnout too, said Diane Ecton. Organizers there knock on doors and recruit people to come. They also have a new Facebook page where they post meeting information.

The key to success may be one of the oldest tricks in the book: free food.

Last September Fair Haven Management Team hosted a neighborhood cookout; over 400 people showed up. The draw: free food donated by local grocery stores and purchased with the pennies of meeting attendees who dropped spare change into a can.

The strategy was on display at Wednesday night’s citywide meeting, too. Ten people in all showed up to headquarters to talk about their CMTs’ challenges — and to eat pizza, of course.