Williamstown's CARES Project Gives Final Report to Select Board
The survey was completed over a two years and more than 150 interviews.
But the main takeaway from the author of the CARES Project's final report was more optimistic.
"The next topic is 'Who's responsible for making sure people feel safe and welcome,' " Kerri Nicoll said while breaking down the 64-page report for the Select Board on Monday. "Without a doubt, this was the question where there was the most agreement. The answer was, in one way or another, 'We all are.' "
That answer was given by an overwhelming number of the 163 residents who participated in in-depth interviews with Nicoll and other social workers who volunteered their time to investigate what "safety" means for Williamstown residents and how safe those same residents feel in the North County community.
"There were a small handful of interviews, four or five, who expressed strong views that we each are responsible as individuals for our own safety and wellbeing," Nicoll told the board. "Aside from that small set, there was agreement that we are responsible, collectively, for each other's sense of safety. I think this is a real strength that we have to build on.
"People on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum were in agreement that, if we want to be a community, we are responsible for each other's safety."
Nicoll and her fellow volunteers picked up the ball and took on the work of completing an ambitious project that began in 2021 under the direction of a paid consultant who left the town's employ after the project was underway.
Seven local social workers conducted the interviews, and the responses were compiled and analyzed by Nicoll, an associate professor of social work at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
On Monday, she met with the Select Board to talk about what the interviewers learned and what recommendations came out of the responses they received from residents.
Not for the first time, Nicoll explained that the CARES Project was a "community-based participatory research" project and its results are qualitative, not quantitative in nature.
Rather than survey 7,000 town residents and asking binary questions like, "Do you feel safe," the social workers elicited responses about what safety meant to the individuals involved and why — or why not — they feel safe in Williamstown.
Nicoll said most of the questions drew a range of responses. Some interview subjects focused on physical safety, for example, while others talked about "emotional/social safety," and many residents talked about both concepts. Some residents framed safety as a question of financial stability, and Kerri implied that response may have been under-represented given the survey group's demographics.
Demographics were a concern for the researchers, who worked hard to reach out to marginalized members of the community but still ended up with a respondent pool that was less diverse than the town's population according to census data. For example, while nearly 20 percent of Williamstown's population identifies as a person of color in U.S. Census data, only 11 percent of the CARES Project sample identified that way.
That said, the interview subjects did reflect diversity of thought, Nicoll said.
"There was not a specific demographic question on ideology … but I can assure you, and I think the interviewers would agree, that the interviews represented a wide variety of perspectives," she said. "There are people whose interviews show polar ideological viewpoints, and they don't necessarily disagree about a lot of the things we talked about."
And there is plenty of evidence in the final report that a large portion of the population feels a sense of safety and belonging in town and has positive views of things like town policing.
But there are also roadblocks to that sense of well-being for some residents — roadblocks ranging from the lack of "intentional community building," the division between the town and Williams College, the lack of health-care resources in the region, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry.
Some of the report's most engaging passages recount interview subjects' experiences with the latter in the town.
"[My son] really, really struggled through high school," one resident recounted. "He was one of very few people of color, and it was awful, awful, awful. His experience through high school at Mount Greylock was terrible … His friends would use the N-word, just like it was normal, and [they'd say], 'Not you' or whatever, right? ... Through my son, I feel like my well-being needs are not met here, because, as a community, we're not acknowledging the racism that is here, and that's a hindrance, for all of us as a community and for me, to feel comfortable, truly comfortable as a community member."
"I think what was really impactful in here is the number of stories of racist incidents that have to do with children in our community," Nicoll said of the report. "Experiences they've had in the schools or just walking down the street. … I think this is something we need to attend to in the community."
Since the CARES Project was originally commissioned by the town in 2020-21, in the middle of a maelstrom resulting from a lawsuit alleging racism in the Williamstown Police Department, the social work team did specifically ask questions about the WPD and its role in promoting safety and wellbeing.
And one of the report's recommendations focused on the role of police.
Specifically, the CARES Project team recommends the town compile a detailed account of mental health and wellbeing calls handled by the WPD and consider implementing a "parallel response program" to handle those calls. The report recommends that Williamstown, "establish a standalone, non-law-enforcement, first-responder system for a broad variety of wellbeing-related calls, including but not limited to mental-health crises."
The report also recommends that the town form a Community Safety Review Committee to consider "best practices and evidence-based alternatives" for potential changes to the way the Police Department interacts with the rest of the community.
Nicoll emphasized that the proposed committee would not be a civilian review board to look at individual incidents involving the police.
"This is about using the data from the CARES Project, the situations and questions people have around, 'Do police really need to be the ones doing X, Y or Z?' " she said.
Many of the recommendations from the CARES report would entail relatively low cost to the town. An exception: a suggestion that Williamstown create a community center that would allow for the kind of community building that many of the respondents identified as key to building a sense of safety for all residents.
The Select Board members thanked Nicoll and the research team for all their work in conducting and analyzing the hours of interviews that went into the report.
"As I read this report, I felt it was an important document for everyone in our community to read," Select Board member Stephanie Boyd said. "It's a good way to remind people we all depend on one another."
Abby Reifsnyder, whom Nicoll identified as conducting half of the 163 interviews, agreed.
"I felt so honored to do so many interviews because I heard so much from so many people," Reifsnyder said. "[The report is] very readable, and you get some of the incredible experience I had doing some of those interviews.
"It was so amazing to hear all the voices, and they are all captured in the report."
The CARES Project's final report is available in the meeting packet for Monday's Select Board meeting, found here.
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