Residents of Pawtucket and Central Falls Invited to Share Health Ideas through New Website

The Pawtucket and Central Falls Health Equity Zone, in partnership with the Rhode Island Department of Health, the Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the Central Providence Opportunities Health Equity Zone, has launched a new website to provide another mechanism to collect ideas for community improvements as part of the participatory budgeting process. 

The website, https://decideri.org/, will provide a way for residents to engage in their community, share ideas, endorse programs, and provide feedback on ways to spend their allocation of federal funds intended to improve social determinants of health. 

Participatory budgeting is the process where community members offer ideas, develop programs, and make the decisions on how funding will be deployed to improve the health of community members. Residents in Pawtucket and Central Falls will determine how to allocate $385,000 to support improved health outcomes and residents in central Providence are tasked with allocating $1M.

“This new participatory budgeting effort, which is engaging two of our HEZs, is yet another example of how we can help ensure residents exercise voice and agency in how government dollars are spent,” said Ana Novais, Acting Secretary of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. “When we truly listen to that voice, we can nurture choice, building systems that afford people and communities the opportunity to do better, the choice to be healthier. And if we listen — if we respond to the voices and fix broken systems — then we can achieve health equity."

Participatory budgeting (PB) prioritizes resident input and provides agency to the people who are being directly affected by disparities in health outcomes. The movement was created in Brazil, spread throughout Latin America in the 1990s, and by the 2000s had spread to Europe and North America. PB came to the US first in Chicago (2009), hopped to New York City (2011), and then spread to dozens of cities across the US.

The process is not new to Central Falls, which launched a small participatory budgeting pilot program last year in its high school. The Central Falls class called “Warriors for Change” held community outreach sessions, developed program ideas, asked for input and conducted a vote on how to spend $10,000 of district funding and chose to update aging bathrooms in the school.

Residents can visit https://decideRI.org to voice their ideas for ways to improve the health and well-being of residents in Pawtucket and Central Falls.

Later, Voces Con Poder, or Voices with Power, was started by school district leadership as a mechanism to engage students and residents on ways to spend $100,000 of COVID relief funding. When the opportunity came to expand the process with additional funds from a federal grant, two Health Equity Zones were well positioned to apply.

“PB is an ongoing process to connect community residents and government in conversation in a way that allocates resources to more directly serve communities, especially those that need them most,” said Becki Marcus, Assistant Program officer at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) of Rhode Island and PCF HEZ coordinator. “But PB is about more than reallocation. It is about building democratic collective capacity and focusing on programs that will have the highest impact on health equity.”

The PCF HEZ has conducted dozens of town halls and community meetings to encourage residents to voice their needs and help create programs that will address the needs in the community.

The community has held multiple town halls, including a youth-led town hall and basketball tournament that attracted more than 90 people, to collect ideas and engage residents. The addition of the website will encourage even more participation in the process. Residents can visit DecideRI.org to share ideas, comment on and endorse other ideas, learn more about the process, and find out about other opportunities to share ideas, including dropbox locations in the community. Idea collection activities will be held until December 9, 2022. In the spring, residents of Central Falls and Pawtucket aged 14 and older can vote, regardless of their eligibility to vote in traditional elections. 

About the Local Initiatives Support Corporation:
LISC is a national nonprofit that equips communities with the capital, program strategy and know-how to become places where people can thrive. Since 1991, LISC Rhode Island has invested more than $460 million in Rhode Island and attracted an additional $1.5 billion from public and private sources resulting in more than 9,106 affordable homes and apartments and more than 2.5 million square feet of retail and community space. 

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