CHAPEL HILL — It will be trick or treat in reverse on Thursday afternoon when teams of volunteers and Chapel Hill police officers walk door-to-door in four neighborhoods near the UNC campus. The teams will deliver the message to be a good neighbor and up to 1,000 goodie bags containing a new 20-page resource booklet, a guide to town services, a business guide and a map with coupons for downtown businesses.
Now in its sixth year, the Good Neighbor Initiative encourages students who live near campus to develop good relationships with their neighbors and to work together to keep their communities clean and safe. This year’s visits will occur a few weeks later in the semester than usual in an effort to catch students at a time when they are not still busy moving in.
For the first time, the Good Neighbor teams will deliver bags and booklets to permanent residents of the neighborhoods as well, but still plan to make student residents the focus of the personal visits. The neighborhoods on the Good Neighbor route are Northside, Pine Knolls, North Columbia and Cameron-McCauley.
The new booklets consolidate valuable information about garbage collection and recycling dates, local noise ordinances and alcohol laws, voter registration, maps, transit information and well as neighborhood histories. Making the deliveries will be teams made up of Community Services police officers, representatives from the UNC Dean of Student Affairs Office and other university departments, UNC student government, the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership and EmPOWERment Inc. — a local nonprofit that promotes affordable housing, community organizing and economic development.
The teams will meet at Hargraves Community Center, 216 N. Roberson St., at 3 p.m. and will walk through the neighborhoods making their deliveries until about 7 p.m.
JUST FOR LAUGHS
To view a humorous two-minute video about the Good Neighbor Initiative, visit www.townofchapelhill.org/psa.
