Fresher Thursday: A Special In Person Conversation on Advancing Health Equity and Economic Mobility
Fresh Fridays

Fresher Thursday: A Special In Person Conversation on Advancing Health Equity and Economic Mobility

This month’s Fresh Fridays featured a special in-person, collaborative panel discussion facilitated by Candace Moore from Race Forward. The conversation focused on current and future efforts to advance health equity and economic mobility in Central Providence through the lens of the newly updated Central Providence Roadmap. Moore was joined by panelists Eloi Rodas, Maria Gomes, and Shelby Mack. 

About our Panelists 

Eloi Rodas is the executive director of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, a community-led organization committed to empowering low-income and immigrant communities through literacy, digital skills, and leadership development.  

Maria Gomes is a Providence resident and a member of Central Providence Unidos’ Resident Advisory Council, a group of community members who live in or have deep ties to Central Providence and serve on the Executive Committee for Central Providence Unidos.  

Shelby Mack is the chief of staff for Building Futures, one of Rhode Island’s leading apprenticeship and career development organizations. She is a strategic advisor for Central Providence Unidos.

Conversation Highlights 

The panel opened with a discussion about the importance of collaboration in place-based work, highlighting the importance of supporting the work and initiatives of partner organizations. Mack emphasized this by stating, “Something that we’ve really been building towards since the beginning of the Roadmap release and even before, is having a shared policy platform so that we can show up for each other’s fights, because we know that we can’t win these fights on our own.”  

The conversation shifted to how groups can effectively organize the community and empower residents. Rodas leveraged his experience as a community organizer to emphasize the importance of learning from past efforts and keeping individuals involved throughout the process, stating “We need to stay engaged because if not, if we are not upholding that collective memory, we’re just jumping from one thing to another and not realizing what’s going on. We need to be community members who are engaged from beginning to end if we really want to do this kind of work.”  Mack further underlined the importance of engaging residents and including them in governance structure, using the example of the governance structure outlined in the Roadmap, “Over time we shifted to a governance structure where there’s an executive committee that is made up of resident advisors and organizational strategic advisors, so people who are coming from non–profits and people who live in the neighborhood, the nine neighborhoods. There is a significant weight given to resident voice, so the quorum that we need to make decisions is really weighted towards residents and less so towards non-profits.”  

As a resident of Central Providence, Gomes testified to her experience seeing a shift in power towards residents, “I feel like I have a lot of power. I started by getting involved initially with the steering committee for the Nine Neighborhood [Fund], and then eventually I got into the RAC because I met members who started inviting me in. If we build connection, if we start somewhere, we start to build connection and eventually we will slowly work towards those changes, but we have to believe in that process, because if we don’t believe in that process, then we give up halfway and nothing gets done.”  

 

To end the panel Moore opened the conversation to the audience, encouraging participants to ask questions related to their community involvement experiences. Audience members raised questions about language barriers present in Central Providence and discussed what success would look like in ten years.  

 

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