Using "Force Multipliers" To Grow And Promote Your Neighborhood Watch

While there is absolutely no substitute for knocking on doors and talking directly to your neighbors about your new neighborhood watch program, there are other "force multipliers" neighborhood watch programs can use to accelerate growth.

Free or "Earned" Media:
Most neighborhood watch groups don't have any money for TV, newspaper or radio advertising, so to get any traditional media coverage they have to make local media outlets want to cover them. This is why my neighborhood watch group has booked interesting speakers through the end of the year - lawmakers, prosecutors, probation officers. Almost anytime an elected official speaks at a gathering, it's newsworthy so reporters will cover the event which helps publicize your neighborhood watch group.

Learn to write a media release and send it to the appropriate traditional media outlets. With a little luck, your media release may hit a news desk on a slow news day and you may find that even your mundane meetings will get coverage.

Just by sending out a few media releases I was invited to write articles and appear on radio talk shows where I promoted an event that was expected to draw only 30-40 registrants but ended up getting hundreds of registrants because of the added free media coverage. All I had to do was write the media releases, send them to some media outlets and wait for the news people to contact me. Good things come to those who know how to write a media release.

Social Media:
When I booked Delegate Suzette Raines to speak at our September 3 meeting, I Tweeted it. Suzette and her friend, Jessica Ralston, re-tweeted my original tweet and it went to thousands of people. Free. 

Folks, it's time to stop pretending you don't know about Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs and other social media platforms. Since neighborhood watch groups don't have any money, it is imperative that we take advantage of this free, fast means of getting your message out to hundreds or even thousands of people through the use of technology you're already paying for anyway. If you have a computer or smart phone with internet connectivity you already have everything you need to put the power of social media to work to build your neighborhood watch. Social Media is not going away. Open a free Twitter account, open a free Facebook account, start a free blog on Google's Blogspot, open a free Linkedin account. Don't worry if you don't know how to use social media. None of us knew how to use social media when we started but we learned by doing.

Make yourself easy to find. It's hard for people to take you seriously if you haven't taken advantage of the free means of making yourself findable.  Start a neighborhood watch group (not a page) on Facebook. Facebook groups provide a sort of virtual town hall where members can carry on conversations with each other. Start a Linkedin group. Get out of the "witness protection program" and get on the internet where people can find you.
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KKeywords: Nitro, WV, West Virginia, Saint Albans, St. Albans, Dunbar, Charleston, Kanawha, Speaker bureau, speakers bureau, speaker's bureau, speakers' bureau, guest speaker, 25177, 25143, 25303, 25309, 25301, 25302, 25305, 25311, 25314, 25304

More Straight Talk About How To Really Start A Neighborhood Watch

To avoid actual contact with people, many new neighborhood watch leaders waste a lot of time and money mailing fliers or practically running through the neighborhood sticking fliers to mailboxes or putting them behind storm doors - without ever knocking on those doors , or course. 

Telling themselves they're "working smarter" not working harder, these flier delivery people hope that interested parties will come to a meeting, send an email or otherwise come to the neighborhood watch.

They won't. Only a small percentage - 2 or 3 % - will make your job easy. Most people will perversely ignore even an effort that benefits them and makes their neighborhood safer. It's a fact. 

Your neighbors are waiting for you to fail. They've seen it before. A bunch of do-gooders rise up to defend their neighborhoods, get discouraged by the lack of interest and quit. Your neighbors are going to make you prove you aren't going away before they get involved. The sooner you show them you know what you're doing, the sooner they get involved.

After spending money and time distributing fliers only to get a few people at your first meeting, you'll be ready to quit. If you're like most neighborhood watch startups, you'll be sitting there at your first meeting all prepared to teach people how to recognize meth houses or whatever only to find that hardly anyone attends.

So let's skip past the part where you have to learn the hard way and you and your team get discouraged and want to give up. Let's skip past the part where you tell yourself you are working smart, not hard.  You aren't working smart. You're working dumb.

There's no substitute for getting out there and going door to door and actually talking to people. On the first visit, ask them for their name, their email address and their cell phone number. Most people will provide that info if you explain that their contact information will be used to send them text messages and emails about crimes in the neighborhood and other neighborhood watch information. 

When people begin receiving those texts and emails they start telling their friends and neighbors, some of whom will call and ask you to add them to the lists. In other words, at some point your group will achieve critical mass and the growth starts to be self-sustaining, but in the beginning plan to knock on a lot of doors and plan to hear comments like "Are you with the police? I'll join if you're with the police."

Plan to get questions about vigilantism, about George Zimmerman, about profiling. Plan to knock and knock on doors behind which you hear TVs and conversations but no footfalls coming to answer the door. A lot of people simply don't answer their doors anymore.

Go back on a Saturday when people are outside mowing their lawns or washing their cars. 

Forget trying to "work smarter not harder". When starting a neighborhood watch, it's all about going out on foot and personally asking people for their contact info, a request they ignore if it comes from a flier but with which they will usually comply if it comes from a person standing on their porch holding a clipboard, a pen at the ready as if to say "I fully expect to get the information I've requested."

Show them that their neighbors have complied then ask again and put your pen to paper, ready to write. Nearly 100% of people who talk to you in person will give you their names, their numbers and their email addresses.

Only a few percent of people who get a flier in their storm door will.


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Keywords: Nitro, WV, West Virginia, Saint Albans, St. Albans, Dunbar, Charleston, Kanawha, Speaker bureau, speakers bureau, speaker's bureau, speakers' bureau, guest speaker, 25177, 25143, 25303, 25309, 25301, 25302, 25305, 25311, 25314, 25304

Suzette Raines Speaks At St. Albans Ward 4 Neighborhood Watch In Just One Week

St. Albans and District 35 House member, Suzette Raines, will speak and answer voter questions at the 6:30PM Tuesday September 3 meeting of the St. Albans ward 4 neighborhood watch to be hosted by Crossing Church, 2031 Harrison Ave.

Apparently Yesterday's Post Was Too Subtle So Let Me Say It Another Way

Apparently some readers didn't understand that when I said city council members should lead their neighborhood watch groups I was appealing to the self-serving, political survivor in them. 

I wasn't saying City Council members do it best.

I was saying City Council members who don't do the hard work of going out and knocking on doors and collecting contact info so they can organize neighborhood watch may very well find that somebody else will step and do it, become better known than the council member and unseat the council member in the next election.

I was saying that City Council members who allow someone else to do it do so at their political peril. 
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Why City Council Members Should Lead Their Wards' Neighborhood Watch Groups

City Council members have more to gain from the success of Neighborhood Watch than the rest of us. If they lead that neighborhood watch effort, that is. 

In my city of 11,000 people in 9 political wards, most people can't even name their city  council person but if that ward has a neighborhood watch the people of that ward get text messages and emails from their neighborhood watch coordinator every week. Over time, ward members may even think their neighborhood watch leader is their city council person. 

Here in my apathetic little town of St. Albans where city council seats have been won with as few as 4 votes, a popular and well-known neighborhood watch coordinator could easily unseat their city council member in the next election unless the city council member and the neighborhood watch coordinator are one in the same. 

Neighborhood watch people in my apathetic little town - I've called it an "apathariat" - are divided on the question of whether or not it's appropriate for city council members to lead their wards' neighborhood watch efforts but I say there's no surer way to win re-election or to position oneself for a mayoral run. If I were a city council member I would make sure I was the best known person in the ward.

Nobody has more to gain from a successful neighborhood watch than your city council member - if he or she is leading it. Leading the neighborhood watch is like having a license to stay in constant contact with people in the ward. A good neighborhood watch leader knocks on doors to recruit new members, sends emails and texts to members and makes old-fashioned phone calls to people in the ward. If our Citywide Neighborhood Watch Czaress, Shelly Douglass Ellis, keeps doing what she's doing she'll not only be better known than her ward's council member but she'll have more citywide name recognition than most city council members citywide when our next election year arrives. She'll be perfectly positioned to run for elected office.

Desper Lemon will be ward 7 councilman as long as he wants to be because he shrewdly seized and kept the spotlight, running the ward 7 neighborhood watch as if it's an official  part of his job description.

My own council member, Cheryl Thomas, can relax. First, she's already pretty well known  in our ward because Cheryl knocked on doors and worked to build a neighborhood watch before me. 

Second, I have written many times that Baby Boomers like me should not be running for city offices. I've consistently said that people with no real stake in the future should not be making decisions for those with a stake in the future. My apathetic little town of St. Albans needs to elect more twenty somethings, not more Boomers like me. I've been unswerving about that. When 28-year-old Jason Philabaun was elected to council in the 2nd ward I was full-throated about our apathariat's need more council members from his generation. I believe this to my core. Cheryl Thomas knows I won't run for council but whoever becomes neighborhood watch coordinator after me may not make such a promise.

But other city council members have something to lose if they don't lead the neighborhood watch effort in their wards. Council members who have not anointed themselves both council member and neighborhood watch coordinator could easily lose the next election to neighborhood watch coordinators who get out and knock on doors, make phone calls, send emails and texts and become the best known members of their wards. 

Robert Keiffer, Ron Colby, Loretta Griffith and Kevin Pennington, I'm talking to you. I think neighborhood watch coordinator, John Kidd , could beat Loretta Griffith  in the 6th ward right now. 

Nobody has more to gain from a successful neighborhood watch than a city council person - but only if that council person is leading it.
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Candid Advice On Starting A Neighborhood Watch

The first thing you need when starting up a neighborhood watch is a fast and free way to communicate with the people in your defined neighborhood. That means smart phone numbers and email addresses so you can simply add people to phone groups and email groups and send emails and texts to a lot of people simultaneously.

Unless somebody gives you a database containing the names, email addresses and smart phone numbers of all the neighbors in your neighborhood, a start up neighborhood watch's first and primary job is to identify the residents of the defined neighborhood and capture their contact information. And by "contact information" I mean smart phone and email. 

Many new neighborhood watch groups make the mistake of either sending mailers to the homes of people within the defined neighborhood or going door to door and leaving invitations to the next meeting but failing to capture a way to communicate with those people fast and free. 

Sending mailers is too expensive and yields few new members.

Inviting people to a meeting is a waste of time unless you also capture their email addresses and smart phone numbers. 

If you don't get the smart phone numbers and the email addresses you have to go back out and knock on doors or you have to spend money on USPS mailings every time you need to tell people something.

Don't get the cart before the horse: collect contact information first, then worry about how to get people to meetings, appointing block captains and such. Get the fast, free way to communicate first. Collect the email addresses and smart phone numbers.

If a neighbor doesn't have a way to receive email or text, get their old-fashioned dumb phone number.

At meetings, make sure you don't let anyone leave without giving up their email and smart phone info. Odds are you'll only get one bite at that apple because so many people attend one meeting then never return. Here's what I do: I get two or three people to help me hand a pen and paper to each person as they enter the room. We ask for name, street address, phone and email. Don't let anyone attend anonymously. Think about it: it's neighborhood watch. Neighbors have to identify each other. When I collect new names and contact info I update may master Excel spreadsheet and email that file to everyone who gave me their email address. In some neighborhood watch groups, the only person who has the contact information is the coordinator. This is insane. If neighbors don't have each other's contact info it's not a neighborhood watch. 

Don't let low attendance or a low return rate discourage you. If you collect the email addresses and the smart phone info you have a chance to demonstrate the value of the watch program. When people start receiving your texts and emails about bad guys who have been caught and crimes that have been stopped because vigilant neighbors communicated with each other and with police, they'll see the value of participating in neighborhood watch. 

Don't be stupid: concentrate all your start up effort on identifying everybody in the neighborhood and capturing their contact information. Unless your city already has this date and will share it with you, you'll have to collect it the hard way, door-to-door. Don't be shy about asking. I can tell you from personal experience that nearly 100% of the people who answer their door will give you the information you request.

When you come home with a page full of names, street addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, enter that information in your email group, your text group and into a master list. I use Excel to make a spreadsheet containing every bit of data I have collected. 

Do the hard work of going door to door and asking for email addresses and text numbers FIRST. Don't waste time and money mailing flyers to residents' homes. They won't reply. Once you've collected email addresses and text numbers from a significant percentage of your neighborhood's residents, you'll always have a way to get your message out - meeting announcements, police tips, suspicious activities - anything. 
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Keywords: Nitro, WV, West Virginia, Saint Albans, St. Albans, Dunbar, Charleston, Kanawha

Kanawha Prosecutor, Mark Plants, Joins The St. Albans Ward 4 Speaker Series

Dec. 3 is a big night in the 2013 St. Albans Ward 4 Neighborhood Watch Speaker series as Kanawha County Prosecutor, Mark Plants, has agreed to join Delegate John B McCuskey on the Dec 3 program.

The Speaker Series is held at Crossing Church , 2031 Harrison Ave, St. Albans.

Here is the entire 2013 St. Albans Ward 4 Neighborhood Watch Speaker Series lineup:

September3 - Delegate Suzette Raines

October1 - Magistrate Mike Sisson

November 5 - Probation Officers Michael Lazo and Michael Shaffer

Dec. 3 - Delegate John B McCuskey and Prosecutor Mark Plants

All Meetings begin at 6:30 PM on the 1st Tuesday of the month at Crossing Church, 2031 Harrison Ave.
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Why A Liberal Neighborhood Watch Coordinator Invites Republicans To Speak At Neighborhood Watch Meetings

If you aren't actively working to establish a neighborhood watch I'd be willing to bet you have no idea what neighborhood watch is really about. No, it's not primarily about crime reduction or law enforcement or even about making a neighborhood safer. Those are desirable by-products of the real work of neighborhood watch. 

Neighborhood watch is primarily about restoring that lost sense of neighborhood. A few days ago I wrote about how and why our towns have lost that sense of neighborhood and I  urge you to find it in my archive and read it but in today's post I want to write about how our lost sense of community dictates how a neighborhood watch coordinator must respond to that lost sense of neighborhood, how that lost sense of neighborhood shapes and dictates the community-building work a watch coordinator must do before he or she can get the by-products of crime reduction and safer neighborhoods. 

The job title "neighborhood watch coordinator" is a misnomer. It should be called "neighborhood creator" or "neighborhood builder" because until you first establish a neighborhood, you can't establish a neighborhood watch. No matter which watch model your program follows - police-run, city government run or civilian run - the neighborhood watch coordinator must first create a neighborhood before he or she can organize that neighborhood into a neighborhood watch. 

For reasons I discussed in an earlier post, we no longer have neighborhoods. We can't even name some of the people who live on our streets much less know how to email them, phone them or text them to invite them to a watch meeting or ask them if the guy who just entered his house is supposed to be there. 

So the first thing you have to do as a neighborhood watch coordinator is to identify the people in your ward or neighborhood and then try to capture contact info like smart phone numbers and email addresses. No, your local police aren't likely to have that information. Your mayor may not have it. Your city council person may not have it. Just the other day I spoke at length with a small-town police chief who is trying to start a neighborhood watch group in his town. I asked him if his city of 8,000 people has some kind of master list of its residents that includes phone numbers and email addresses and he told me they didn't. You're going to have to go door-to-door and gather this information the hard way.

And don't be surprised when a lot of people won't tell you their name or their email address or their phone number. But you can't have an effective, functional neighborhood watch program until everybody knows how to reach everybody else in the group. So your first role as a neighborhood watch coordinator is Identifier In Chief and Contact Information Documentarian. Good luck. It's hard. It's time consuming. 

If you're lucky, you'll have some block captains who will gather that information from the people who live in their immediate areas, but, I have to be honest, when you ask somebody to be a block captain he'll stop walking his dog past your house for fear that you'll ask again. People want the by-products of neighborhood watch organizing - the safer neighborhood and increased property values - but they don't want to do any work to make that happen.

Think about it: if you don't have time to walk your entire ward by yourself before each meeting and you don't have money to mail fliers to every address in your ward and you don't have email addresses and phone numbers for the people in your ward, how will you make your neighbors aware that there even is a neighborhood watch?

If you're like me and the neighborhood watch coordinators I know, you'll find yourself creating newsworthy events that seemingly have nothing to with neighborhood watch, you'll find yourself mailing media releases to members of the news media, you'll find yourself doing more social media than an introvert like me wants to do.

By the way, here are the speakers in our 2013 St. Albans Ward 4 Speaker Series:

Sept 3 - Delegate Suzette Raines
Oct 1 - Magistrate Mike Sisson
Nov 5 - Probation Officers Michael Lazo and Michael Shaffer
Dec. 3 - Delegate JB McCuskey
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Higginbotham At Large reads all submitted comments but only PUBLISHES comments from clearly identified submitters. There's no Ring of Gyges for me so there's no Ring of Gyges for you. Besides, Higginbotham At Large has no respect whatsoever for cowards who won't sign their names to their opinions.

Sign The Petition To Ask St. Albans City Council To Adopt Huntington's Dog Tethering Ordinance

I signed the electronic petition to give St. Albans dogs the same protection from cruel tethering that the City of Huntington gave their dogs 4 years ago. You can sign the petition, too. Click this link: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/318/410/863/stop-tethering-dogs-in-st-albans-wv/#next_action

Cities all over the United States and Canada are enacting city ordinances that protect dogs from being tethered outside without access to food, water, shelter and companionship. Tethered dogs live miserable, lonely lives.

We're asking St. Albans to adopt the Huntington law because it is simple and clear. Unlike the Kanawha County "Linz Law" which is riddled with exceptions and loopholes, the Huntington law makes it easy for law enforcement to see at a glance if the law is being violated. 

The Huntington law reads: "It shall be unlawful for any owner or other person controlling or possessing any dog to tether a dog outdoors without direct supervision of the animal's guardian."

Sign the petition to protect the dogs of St. Albans, WV, from cruelty on the end of a chain. Click here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/318/410/863/stop-tethering-dogs-in-st-albans-wv/#next_action

Why Your St. Albans Neighborhood Watch Groups Are Hosting Speakers, Block Parties and Other Social Events

A few weeks ago I gave voice to what John and Wilma Kidd, Cheryl Thomas, Shelly Ellis and some of the other neighborhood watch people already knew when I said, "Before we can protect a neighborhood with a neighborhood watch we have to first restore that lost sense of neighborhood." The things that once united us now divide us. Take the once common "neighborhood church". Sunday used to be the day you worshipped with people you already saw all week long because you lived in the same neighborhood. No, you don't know where I'm going with this. I am not going to laud these neighborhood churches nor am I going to decry their disappearance. I'm going to explain how their disappearance has contributed to our citywide loss of the sense of "neighborhood" and "community" we once had.

But first I have to explain what I mean by the disappearance of the neighborhood church because some of my readers will say that they still exist. If by "exist" you mean that such former neighborhood churches as Highlawn Presbyterian, Highlawn Baptist and First Christian still exist, yes, they still exist on paper. And their edifices are still there. But they aren't neighborhood churches anymore. 

Neighborhood churches are churches built to interact with the people who lived within walking distance. This goes back to a time when many families had only one car or no car at all so they walked to church. These neighborhood churches are land=locked, that is, they are closely bordered by residences on all sides and there's nowhere for them to enlarge parking. Some neighborhood churches never had a parking lot because they didn't need one and didn't foresee a time that they would. So, the people who attended these neighborhood churches all lived in the same neighborhood and their common church unified them and gave them a sense of community. 

Many former neighborhood churches are simply closed now, their membership too old and too and too few in numbers to support a pastor and an edifice.

Those that remain aren't neighborhood churches anymore because, as people became more mobile and more independent and could get in their cars and drive to any church they wish, people are now attending churches where they don't live, not churches where they live. In some cases, people actually choose to attend churches outside their own neighborhoods as a way of protecting their privacy from the neighbors. I call this phenomenon "Casual Anonymous Church Among Consenting Adults".There are few secrets for a family that attends church where most of the people in the pews are also neighbors. 

And the neighborhood churches decline and die because they can't "compete" with the almost-mega-churches like Maranatha or Bible Center. This is called the "feeder-receptor phenomenon because the larger churches grow at the expense of the smaller churches.

Some of these former neighborhood churches avoided decline and closure by buying surrounding properties to make parking. One such former neighborhood church that bought itself time and opportunity by buying its neighboring houses is Highlawn Baptist. But while that familiar old neighborhood edifice is still there, Highlawn Baptist isn't a neighborhood church anymore. Highlawn Baptist is now more of a citywide or even regional church because it now has enough parking to accommodate an independent, mobile churchgoer wherever he is.

If you were to go to any of the churches I've mentioned here, you would find that relatively few of their attendees live in the neighborhood. People in the same pew are strangers to each other and won't see or think about each other until next Sunday. 

Similarly, neighborhood schools are gone. When my family moved to St. Albans in 1962 I lived close enough to Parkway Elementary, Highlawn Elementary and Belvil Elementary that attending any of them would have been OK with my parents and I. I was assigned to Belvil. It doesn't exist now. It's part of the high school. Highlawn Elementary is a "sports complex". Parkway Elementary has been torn down and is now a parking lot for a nearby church and a nearby flea market. The newer Alban Elementary now serves as the elementary school for practically the whole east half of St. Albans and most of the kids aren't neighbors to each other which means most of the parents aren't neighbors, either, so, once again, one source of community building - the neighborhood elementary school - is gone.

What do these changes mean for Neighborhood Watch? They mean that we cannot form neighborhood watch groups until we first restore that lost sense of neighborhood we once had. If you're old enough to remember "party lines", e.g., telephone lines shared by 2 or more telephone subscribers, you're old enough to remember when some of St. Albans' neighborhoods still had a sense of unity and cohesiveness, a sense that somehow we're all in this thing together and we have to watch each other's backs. 

That's why you should attend your neighborhood watch block party, ice cream social, cookout or a special speaker series. Your Watch group is trying to get people together, in one place, where they can, perhaps, regain a sense of neighborhood or experience it for the first time. 
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Introducing The 2013 St. Albans Ward 4 Speaker Series

September 3  

35th district House member, Suzette Raines. Earlier this year Delegate Raines announced her candidacy for the state senate.

October 1  
Kanawha County Magistrate, Mike Sisson. 

November 5  
Kanawha County Probation Officers Michael Lazo and Michael Shaffer.

December 3 
District 35 Delegate JB McCuskey.

Join our "Public Group for St. Albans Neighborhood Watch" on Facebook for updates.

Unless otherwise noted in our Facebook group, all the above meetings will occur at 6:30 PM at The Crossing Church, 2031 Harrison Ave. In St. Albans. 

Contact Joseph Higginbotham at (304) 550-6710 or JosephHigginbotham@gmail.com.

"Poorly Attended" Means "Poorly Publicized" : How St. Albans Has Damaged Its Brand Through Poor Event Promotion

If St. Albans doesn't start getting bigger crowds at our events, news media  will stop covering our events. 

Radio stations will stop doing "live remotes" from our events.

Speakers will stop accepting invitations to speak at our events. I couldn't get some of the speakers I wanted in our Ward 4 Speaker Series because these speakers had accepted invitations for meetings that were never promoted and found themselves speaking to only 4 or 5 people.

St. Albans has damaged its brand by inviting TV reporters to cover events with embarrassingly low attendance. Here's an example: On May 14 2013 St. Albans had a "citywide" meeting of all neighborhood watch volunteers. We were to meet in the St. Albans High School library. I was expecting a big crowd. When I got there I felt ashamed and embarrassed because there were more media people than there were neighborhood watch people. When you hear the words "poorly attended" think "poorly publicized". 

If you organize an event you have a responsibility to promote that event. You owe it to the busy people you invite to speak. You owe it to the vendors who come there to sell their products and services. You owe it to the news media who come there expecting to have something to cover.

Promotion of your event basically takes 2 forms. (a) promotion in advance of the event and (b) realtime coverage of the event itself. St. Albans organizations do the latter but not the former. Or, put another way, if you skip the pre-event publicity then when the TV cameras arrive they document your failure to do your job. You'll have more cameras than people. Pretty soon, even the cameras won't come to memorialize your failure to do your job.

St. Albans organizations have damaged the St. Albans brand by becoming the city whose events are not news because they are poorly publicized which translates to poorly attended.

If the leaders of St. Albans organizations want to enjoy being on TV in the future they have to prove that when the cameras arrive there'll be something newsworthy to cover.
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Higginbotham At Large reads all comments but only publishes the comments of people who clearly identify themselves. There's no Ring of Gyges for me, so there's no Ring of Gyges for you.

Introducing The St. Albans Ward 4 Speaker Series

September 3  
35th district House member, Suzette Raines. Earlier this year Delegate Raines announced her candidacy for the state senate.

October 1  
Kanawha County Magistrate, Mike Sisson. 

November 5  
Kanawha County Probation Officers Michael Lazo and Michael Shaffer.

December 3 
District 35 Delegate JB McCuskey.

Join our "Public Group for St. Albans Neighborhood Watch" on Facebook for updates.

Unless otherwise noted in our Facebook group, all the above meetings will occur at 6:30 PM at The Crossing Church, 2031 Harrison Ave. In St. Albans. 

Contact Joseph Higginbotham at (304) 550-6710 or JosephHigginbotham@gmail.com.