City: Seattle, Washington

Reporting to: Director, Innovation & Performance

The Challenge

Seattle’s downtown faces a number of complex challenges, including the remote work revolution, the ever-evolving retail landscape, affordable housing pressures, homelessness and addiction crises, and environmental priorities. Increasingly, Seattleites are expressing concern and frustration over crime, drugs, and public safety in the area. Through June 23, 2023, Seattle Fire responded to 2,827 emergency medical events involving drug use—65% more than in 2022. Meanwhile, overdose deaths have nearly doubled since 2022. Yet, recent polls found that 88% of Seattle residents believe that a thriving downtown is critical to the region’s economic recovery—but 81% are worried about the area’s future. Mayor Bruce Harrell agrees: “Downtown must be safe, welcoming, and a neighborhood for all…This is not about restoring the Downtown of the past, but rather reimagining what is possible as our city evolves.” Reinvigorating downtown will be the mayor’s legacy project.

Seattle demonstrated the efficacy of cross-departmental projects in 2021 with a Unified Care Team that helped resolve encampments in public rights-of-way throughout downtown. In 2023, the Downtown Action Plan was established to help make the city safer and ensure residents feel secure. By 2024, the Downtown Activation Team (DAT) was created, uniting public safety, activation, and human services to help address negative uses of downtown, encourage sustainable, positive activities, and connect vulnerable residents with critical support services. Progress is being made with the DAT; the revitalization of downtown must not negatively impact the unhoused or other vulnerable populations. One challenge that has emerged is the development of performance metrics that can facilitate necessary course corrections.

The fellow will help us improve how we track and measure progress against the priorities described in our One Seattle Restoration Framework. This project directly connects to our ongoing work with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative Collaboration track, and we expect the fellow to support the execution of two to three initiatives that emerge from the track. For example, the fellow could focus on how human services providers collect data resulting in a report and framework to align providers around key metrics and goals. Other deliverables could include a demonstration data set or visualization to better track and report progress on achieving downtown activation strategies as described in our One Seattle Restoration Framework.

Key questions include:

• Are the problems identified in the framework getting worse or better (e.g., violence, crime, drug use, cleanliness)?
• How can municipal systems more precisely describe the demand for services?
• How are partners tracking care for people interacting with multiple services? Can improvements be made to reduce drop-offs and increase warm hand-offs from one service to another?
• How can we gauge the effectiveness of services, case workers, and outreach?
• What are some successful examples of measuring the impact of cross-departmental service teams that Seattle can emulate?

What You’ll Do

To answer these questions, the fellow will engage human services organizations, such as Third Avenue Project and LEAD, that are funded to provide outreach, services, and case management downtown. The fellow will be a key member of our Innovation & Performance team with responsibility for the following deliverables:

1. Landscape assessment: conduct interviews with city staff and external stakeholders to understand our current data and what data we might need to track and report progress on the strategies described in our One Seattle Restoration Framework. This landscape assessment would help us clearly define the problem and surface the data most useful for us and other stakeholders.
2. Ideation workshop: working collaboratively with the city team to develop a demonstration project that sets the collective vision (e.g., for a data dashboard).
3. Develop the demonstration project and present the final product to the mayor and stakeholders, implement an action plan, and hand off the project to the city.

In addition, the fellow will support the strategic execution of key initiatives that emerge from the work on the Collaboration track and provide support on the frameworks and tools learned to another high-priority area.

What You’ll Bring

• Data analysis
• Qualitative interviewing and analysis
• Policy analysis
• Design thinking