Largest Citywide Public-Private Engagement Initiative ‘NYC Speaks’ Approaches Finish Line, as Action Plan is Drafted Using the Input of 60,000+ New Yorkers
Drafting process continues for the final Action Plan, a roadmap of next steps for City administration, as ‘NYC Speaks,’ the public engagement campaign designed to bring voices of all New Yorkers to Mayor Adams’ administration, enters its final phase.
New York (September 6, 2022) – The NYC Speaks effort, which began as a civic engagement initiative designed to engage New Yorkers through a months-long effort to gather community input on key policy areas, is entering its final phase: Action Plan drafting.
To date, the NYC Speaks initiative has conducted a citywide survey that garnered 62,000 responses – 18,400 from young New Yorkers – representative of New Yorker’s racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity. From there, community based organizations throughout the city hosted community conversations on key issues that rose to the top in the survey. More than 4,800 New Yorkers participated. NYC Speaks is now using the information gathered through this process, with collaboration from Mayor Adams’ administration, to create a blueprint for the future of the city with concrete priorities, policies and budget items.
Through the summer, NYC Speaks convened Action Planning Workshops, a series of in-person planning workshops designed to convert community input into tangible government actions. For this final phase of work, NYC Speaks invited a curated group of senior government leaders, non-profit service providers, activists, academics, and philanthropists to collaborate on policies that are responsive to community concerns collected from the process, and implementable on a higher level within the administration. The goals of Action Plan Workshops have been to: 1) co-design priority actions around high priority issues that emerged from the survey, and 2) develop partnerships between city government, issue leaders, community organizations, and funders around those actions.
The culminating milestone will be the final Action Plan where all the insights that have emerged through this process will come together in a set of actionable recommendations. This framework will have the potential to inform upcoming administration plans, community programming and advocacy, and legislative agendas. The Action Plan is currently being drafted by the NYC Speaks team and will be released in the fall.
