(Inactive) The Providence Plan

Mission

The Providence Plan’s mission is to improve the economic and social well-being of Providence, its residents, and its neighborhoods. We provide data analysis for government agencies and community groups on a variety of issues, such as economic development, public safety, health, jobs, and education. We also operate programs focused on children’s well-being, workforce development, and the capacity of our state's nonprofit sector.

History

The Providence Plan was launched in 1992 as a joint effort of the City of Providence and the State of Rhode Island to promote better collaboration between government, the private sector, and academic institutions.  

Our earliest work focused on generating neighborhood-level data and information about Rhode Island’s capital city.  We crunched census and municipal data, worked to develop indicators of community well-being, and sat down with local stakeholders to find ways in which this information could support their work.

Over time, our data work began to highlight specific, unmet needs in Providence.  Driven by our core partners, ProvPlan was spurred to take action.  We initiated programmatic operations where we felt we could make a measurable difference in the well-being of our city. YouthBuild was our first success -

an alternative education program that showed how a targeted investment could help Providence’s high school dropout population become self-sufficient and engaged members of their community.  In 2004 and 2005, we followed up with the creation of our Ready to Learn Providence and New Roots programs. Building Futures, our newest initiative, was established in 2007.  

Today, ProvPlan balances the “thinking” and “doing” portions of our work.  Data remains a core focus and over the next several years we look forward to leveraging new technologies that will allow us to present greater amounts of information more quickly - and in increasingly interactive formats.  We also remain fundamentally committed to expanding the work of our programs and seeding new initiatives that are consistent with our mission.

Information Group

The Information Group is the original initiative of The Providence Plan. Its work focuses on democratizing information – transitioning data from the spreadsheets and complex databases into maps, charts, and interactive tools that allow policymakers and residents to use it as a driver for community change.

Within Rhode Island, the Information Group is most widely known for the information and tools it provides online, free of charge.  Every week, hundreds of unique visitors come to our website to find information that empowers them to make smart, evidence‐ based decisions about their work in Rhode Island. The interactive maps, charts, and graphs that we offer are compiled from federal, state, and local statistics that make up ProvPlan’s “data warehouse” – the largest of its kind in Rhode Island. By integrating datasets

from multiple sources, these tools provide a comprehensive snapshot of communities that could never be told by organizations working alone. For residents across the state, this is meaningful information that reflects the story of their homes and families. For decision makers, tools like our Community Profiles and layered maps point to unmet needs and highlight specific opportunities for economic and social investment.  

Among state and city agencies, ProvPlan’s InfoGroup is also known as a trusted partner and dynamic collaborator. Over the last 20 years, we have contracted with a number of government and nonprofit entities on a range of projects that have leveraged our capacity to accomplish interactive web development, GIS, data analysis, and technical training.

While the Information Group's earliest work was focused on issues related to the wellbeing of residents in Providence, in recent years our data work has increasingly taken on a statewide focus. During a set of strategic discussions between Providence Plan board members and senior staff over the last several years, there was an emerging consensus that Rhode Island needed more independent organizations to provide data analysis and technical support to state and legislative leaders on issues that affect all of urban Rhode Island. It was agreed that The Providence Plan and our Information Group had both a mission and a capacity to fulfill such a role.