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City of Providence

Leading the most robust public engagement process in Providence’s history

Challenge

With roughly $166 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, the City of Providence faced an enormous problem: how to distribute these funds in a manner that brought relief to those hit hardest by COVID-19 and address long-standing issues exacerbated by the pandemic.

Approach

SCS's approach engages a wide range of community organizations and leaders to ensure diverse and inclusive public engagement and successful implementation of community-driven recommendations, as well as leveraging project management and budget analysis expertise to bolster efficient and equitable city governance.

Outcome

The most robust public engagement process in the City of Providence’s history and a set of spending recommendations dubbed the “Providence Rescue Plan” genuinely represented the people’s will which the City of Providence could take to the Council. SCS led five community engagement sessions, facilitated two business roundtables, managed 13 public meetings of the Task Force in compliance with the Open Meetings Act, and collected over 1,100 surveys (both digitally and in-person) from a population roughly matching the racial and ethnic demographics of Providence. We planned to accomplish this over a year; instead, we completed it all in just over three months.

“It was a pleasure working with SCS while serving as co-chair of the Providence COVID-19 Recovery and Resiliency Task Force. Their ability to analyze and present data in a thorough and comprehensible way made our task of recommending spending for over $100 million in ARPA funding a much smoother process. I was also impressed by their commitment to gathering a wide variety of authentic input from historically underrepresented communities and making sure that the needs of these communities were faithfully represented in our final product.”

Angie Ankoma

Vice President and Executive Director, Rhode Island Foundation

Services Rendered

Project Management, Public Engagement, Web & Graphic Design, Report Writing, and Content Development

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