In order to honor the imperative of home security, home owners need to be thinking about their own house (micro) and about their entire community (macro): only thinking about the former and ignoring the latter is by no means a recipe for obtaining genuine security at and around the home. It doesn’t require much explaining for people to be able to appreciate the need to focus on one’s own property; however, home owners many times fail to grasp the importance of broaching the security topic in a broader community context. The simple reality is that if your own security levels are excellent but those of all the homes surrounding you are far from it, well, then you’re really not in the position that you would like to be in. And even if your neighbors don’t have the same budget to allocate to home security issues that you do, there are many aspects of security that they can improve that don’t require anything more than a minimal investment of money and time.
Of course, bringing your own home’s security levels up to (or above) par is an excellent start, and is the first order of business for any home owner. You simply will not be able to go around town (or just your neighborhood) crusading for the cause of greater security when your own property is a security disaster; hence, obey the common sense maxim that a person has to get their own matters in order before they can go about telling others how to do so. In this regard, you will want to present a comprehensive security panorama at your home, demonstrating to neighbors and other members of the community what it means to tackle home security issues of all kinds and at every level. This will imply incorporating the latest in security systems and technologies, and furthermore will imply performing the regular household and outdoor chores that are fundamental for guaranteeing security—such as keeping dead vegetation to a minimum to avoid fire hazards and generally grooming the surroundings of your property to deny burglars of the kinds of hiding spots that they need to pull off their “work.”
With such basics in place, you will want to try going about promoting awareness of basic home security issues among the various members of your community, focusing principally on those homes/neighbors that appear to have the worst security panorama in place. Offer to help them with improving their security situation in whatever way you can; in this aspect, you will find that even more valuable than offering financial help to others is simply offering a bit of your time and knowledge. Try to organize home security workshops in your neighborhood or any kind of creative gathering that will be likely to have a good turn out among the members of your community. If you make the promise of being able to help people boost their security levels, you’d be surprised just how many faces turn up at the meeting after all!