Get alarmed and get going: Increasing community capacity for fire safety

East Cleveland, Ohio, has all of the factors associated with elevated fire risk: high population density, low income, high minority residency, high poverty rates, and older housing stock. Most efforts to reduce fire risk in communities like this rely on outsiders coming into neighborhoods, making changes based on their perceptions of problems and solutions, and leaving at the end of a grant period or project timeline. To be effective in making long-lasting changes, however, local level injury prevention must be truly community based. This presentation describes a fire safety effort in East Cleveland that serves as a model of community mobilization. With the aid of a small grant, Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital partnered with the East Cleveland Fire Department to decrease fire risk in the community by enacting a local ordinance requiring smoke detectors and providing installation of free detectors. With little input from our agency, community members adopted the project as their own, developed messages and methods that resonated with their community, and recruited partners throughout the city. The Shaw High School Fire Cadets took on the effort as a service project and have installed more than 400 smoke detectors for city residents since 2005. The investment of community members created an ongoing program that genuinely belongs to the city. This effort exemplifies how empowering a community and giving them the resources they need can result in truly community-based efforts to prevent injuries and promote health.