Community Outreach Service Center (COSC) ensures that the voices, experiences, and perspectives of the communities we serve are included in the planning, design, and implementation of programming through listening to the community and providing resource that are needed. COSC has been in the community since 1988.
COSC has been an agent of social change for 4 decades and part of collective work addressing recidivism, HIV/Aids, Homelessness, Drug addiction, The community voice is reflected in our organization's leadership and governance through our leadership. Our staff are persons of color and have served the community for over 40 years. Our leadership team are people with roots in the community.
Our peer-to-peer connector model engages community residents, constituents, and community members with culturally competent shared lived experience in our work through training's and programming based on servant-leader principles. We offer different entry points to servant-leader training to youth, parents, community activists, and community based organizations. Our philosophy is to create peer to peer connectors with shared lived experience that serve the needs of others through listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasiveness, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment, and building community. The COSC peer to peer connector team has lived experience with mental health, substance abuse, and incarceration. They have lived that life, but now live a life with purpose serving those who are where they were.
COSC is a community-centered organization. COSC is not community based as only militaries have bases. COSC is rooted in the community, and our tree rings are thick and thin, as we have grown with and in the community. COSC is the lived experience of the community that we know and see on the sidewalks and homes of our community not just at our center.