EmcArts selects Providence as pilot site for social challenge project

PROVIDENCE IS one of two cities selected by New York City-based EmcArts Inc. for a Community Innovation Lab, a project to help local communities address tough social challenges.
PROVIDENCE IS one of two cities selected by New York City-based EmcArts Inc. for a Community Innovation Lab, a project to help local communities address tough social challenges.

PROVIDENCE – EmcArts Inc. has selected Providence and Winston-Salem, N.C., as two pilot sites for Community Innovation Labs, a project supported by the Kresge Foundation.
The labs help local communities address tough social challenges by bringing together diverse stakeholders and integrating artists and artistic practice into rigorously designed and facilitated change processes.
Beginning this fall, community leaders, artists and residents in these sites will co-create innovative strategies to address urgent local challenges in civic and cultural life, with Providence focusing on community safety and cultural life in the neighborhood of Trinity Square. Winston-Salem will focus on inequities in employment, income and wealth.
Both cities will receive $65,000 in local investment, and $150,000 from EmcArts for in-kind support for program design, facilitation and consultation.
New York City-based EmcArts, which designed the lab framework, is a nationally recognized service organization for innovation and adaptive change. The agency launched a competitive national search among 71 different communities for these labs.
In Providence, the local Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism and Rhode Island Local Initiative Support Corp. will convene the lab, focusing on the diverse Trinity Square neighborhood of upper South Providence, and examine the question: “How can we together develop and test creative approaches to improving community safety and cultural life?”
“The core values of the lab are a directly in line with our citizen engagement missions,” said Lynne McCormack, director of the city’s Department of Art, Culture and Tourism. “The Community Innovation Lab will allow us to deepen our organizations’ commitments to dialogue and strengthen our own place-based practices. We have no doubt the co-created approach to the lab will lead to positive, equitable change.”
The Kresge Foundation is a $3.5 billion private, national foundation that works to expand opportunities in America’s cities through grant-making.

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