Providence residents, city leaders and state officials joined the Providence Plan, a nonprofit organization dedicated to data-driven analysis and social solutions, in celebrating its 20th anniversary last night. The event drew hundreds of people to the Roger Williams Park Casino to remember the organization's late founders with eponymous awards to some of its supporters and advocates.
The celebration marked "the beginning of the next 20 years" for the organization, said Richard Spies, chairman of the Providence Plan and interim senior vice president for University advancement. "We don't plan to go anywhere."
During the event, Gov. Lincoln Chafee '75 P'14 and Mayor Angel Taveras honored some of the organization's influential leaders with inaugural awards named for Fred Lippitt and Tom Anton, respectively. Recipients included Louis Fazzano, the former president of the boards for Lifespan and the Rhode Island School of Design, and Nzinga Misgana '87, the first director of New Roots Providence, a Providence Plan initiative dedicated to improving community organizations through training and grants.
"(Lippitt) served with selfless determination," said Chafee, a close friend of the former state politician after whom the award was named.
Taveras, a former Providence Plan board member, also paid tribute to Anton, who helped recruit him to the board early in his career. "(Anton) said I was going to go places, but I didn't go far," he joked.
Taveras described Anton, a former director of the University's Taubman Center for Public Policy, as a visionary leader.
"We were fortunate to have (Anton) here in our city and our state," he said.
The celebration was "a stepping up and stepping out" event intended to raise awareness and support on a larger scale than any of the organization's previous events, said Patrick McGuigan, executive director of the Providence Plan. "We've never done anything like this before."
In addition to honoring the night's awardees, the celebration also sought to showcase how the different branches of the organization contribute to its overall mission of using data analysis to find solutions to social problems.
"A lot of people know us for our data work," said Development and Strategy Associate Lisa Chice, but she noted that they do not always associate the plan with its subsidiary initiatives.
"This was an opportunity for all our constituents to come together," Chice added.
Back to the source
The Providence Plan celebrated more than its longevity last night. The nonprofit, founded in 1992 as a joint effort between Providence and, to a certain extent, Brown, has spent the last two decades targeting and fixing data-specific problems. A consultant can identify a problem, but the Providence Plan is unique in that it has the resources and leadership capacities to fix the problem, McGuigan said. "We are a think and do tank."
The Providence Plan started out crunching census data in an attempt to identify areas in Providence where the community was underserved by its civic institutions. The program found that Providence youth - and particularly young men of color - were falling behind early in their educational careers, dropping out of high school and then having trouble obtaining employment and becoming self-sufficient. The first major initiative the Providence Plan developed - Ready to Learn - addressed this cycle of unemployment and social dependency by creating reform at an early age - kindergarten.
The Providence Plan used data to show that poor and minority students were already trailing their more affluent peers in kindergarten, and that the "achievement gap" only grew as the years progressed. "Kids come into kindergarten already behind, and if you start behind in kindergarten, it's really hard to catch up," McGuigan said. Ready to Learn trains parents and teachers to reach these at-risk children before kindergarten so they come into school on a level playing field.
Since Ready to Learn was formed in 2003, the Providence Plan has trained about 2,500 early childhood educators. The program has shown that the students who work with these educators outperform their peers. Spies said the program has played an important role in a national movement that is beginning to understand the importance of preschool educations.
For students who fall behind and seem at risk of dropping out, the Providence Plan has developed Building Leaders, a program that places high school students on construction sites as apprentices. The teenagers are "required to continue education while learning a trade," gaining marketable skills while finishing their degrees, Spies said.
The University has "been the largest supporter of the Building Teachers program in the entire state," McGuigan said, describing former president Ruth Simmons as a "huge fan" of the program. "If you took shots of the medical school being built, you would see Building Teachers apprentices," he added.
Programs like Building Leaders and Ready to Learn originate from the Providence Plan and are never legally separate, but they have a lot of autonomy to direct their own work, McGuigan said. The organization does not run the initiatives day-to-day, but focuses on administrative tasks like finding funding and coordinating disparate elements to work together for the community's betterment, he added.
Beyond the numbers
Though the organization has no plans for another fundraising celebration of this scale again soon, Chice said staff members "haven't ruled it out."
"(The attendees) are people that are part of our work, and we're here to celebrate them," Chice said. "We want them to feel good about their part in the Providence Plan's history."
Attendees reflected positively on the organization's legacy.
"I could not bel
ieve it was 20 years old," said Barbara Anton, whose late husband Tom served as the organization's second chairman. Anton, who worked at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women before her retirement in 2000, also highlighted the close connection between the University and Providence.
"The relationship between Brown and the city was one thing Tom was very proud of," she said. "It is such a small city. It's easy for the students to get involved and the politicians to get involved with Brown."
"It's wonderful, what has happened," she added. "I just hope it continues."
In the meantime, the Providence Plan is continuing the core of its work. Information Group Director Jim Lucht, who directs the Providence Plan's data analysis, described the organization's emphasis on "seeing needs and finding opportunities to fill those needs." Gathering and publishing data in accessible ways, he said, is central to that mission.
"People's expectations (about data) have changed," he said, pointing to the New York Times' interactive graphic displays as new "easily understandable" displays of data. To make the Providence Plan's information more accessible, Lucht said the organization is planning on launching new "community profiles" in November. The new profiles would better fulfill data requests on a more local level, he said. "That, I think, is going to be the bread and butter for a lot of towns."
McGuigan also stressed the Providence Plan's mission of working with the community. "We partner, we share, we collaborate," he said. "We are all in this together."
