Toole County National Night Out events slated for Aug. 2

National Night Out (NNO), an annual community-building campaign that promotes police-community partnerships and neighborhood camaraderie, is returning to Toole County again this year at Aronow Park on Tuesday, Aug. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. Music via DJ, various booths offering information on a variety of services available in the area and face painting are just a few things on the NNO agenda. This is a free event and all are encouraged to attend!

NNO is not a new event, dating back over 20 years with the United States and Canada celebrating on the first Tuesday in August. The idea for the event came from Matt Peskin, who back in 1970 was a volunteer for the Lower Merion Community Watch program in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, Penn. 

Peskin would often patrol local areas and soon created a newsletter on community success stories and local volunteer work. He soon realized that new content for the newsletter was difficult to come by and began reaching out to surrounding communities for ideas. He soon noticed they all had local groups of neighborhood watches, but no way to connect or even identify other groups. The National Sheriffs’ Association partly funded the creation of the National Neighborhood Watch program in the 1970s and local groups have been contributing to safety and security ever since.

Almost 10 years later, Peskin established his own group, the National Association of Town Watch. This group linked all neighborhood town watches, provided them with resources and gave them assets to help keep them up and running. It was three years after Peskin founded his group that NNO became a national event, with the first celebration being huge, 2.5 million neighbors from 400 communities in 23 states.

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