A near decade old grassroots committee intended to address the drug addiction and violence at Massachusetts Avenue, Melnea Cass Boulevard (Mass and Cass) and surrounding neighborhoods is restructuring into what the groups calls a partnership between neighborhood stakeholders and city, state and private representatives.

The South End, Newmarket, Roxbury Working Group on Addiction, Recovery, and Homelessness reorganization will see a five-person co-chairmanship formed, designed to act as a steering group.

The move, announced February 18, comes as working group members reported increased violence and drug use in areas near the Mass and Cass intersection. It also comes a few months after a new director, Kellie Young, was named to the city’s Coordinated Response Team tasked with addressing the area’s homelessness and substance use.

The steering group includes Young, State Representative John Moran, City Councilor John FitzGerald, Newmarket Business Improvement District head Sue Sullivan and South End Forum founder Steve Fox.

The steering group co-chairs “will have finite work pieces that will be reporting back to the larger group regularly,” Sullivan said.

The plan, according to Fox, is to focus on four separate areas, short- and long-term public safety initiatives, long-term recovery campus planning, housing and mandatory treatment.

“I think the important piece to it is that these are not groups that are going to be working forever without coming up with recommendations and determinations,” Sullivan said.

At the working group’s February meeting, its first in several months, Worcester Square Neighborhood Association co-president Andrew Brand said the population at Mass and Cass and surrounding neighborhoods has continued to grow and violence continues to increase this winter.

“We’re in a pretty dire situation at this point,” he said. “There’s no other way to put it.”

Brand also said he was “deathly scared of what’s going to happen” as the weather warms and more people congregate in the area.

“We’ve been trying the same thing for 10 years, and it hasn’t been working,” Brand said. “We really need to make an abrupt change in our policy and in our goals.”

Young said the team was hosting calls five times a week with Boston police and management for triaging certain people and cases.

Asked by Councilor John FitzGerald about what’s being done differently, Young said the team was “taking a proactive approach.”

“We’re not reacting anymore,” she said.

“It’s proactive, and we are partnering with law enforcement, which is incredibly different, to have a preventative co-response.”

Speaking to the working group for the first time, Young also said she was a proponent of section 35, a state law permitting courts to involuntarily commit someone for substance use disorder treatment, that it was a “lifesaving measure and a pathway to recovery.”

“I like to say this is the tough love era of the city,” Young said.

The group will next meet in about a month, according to Fox.