Strong Cities, Strong Communities Visioning Challenge

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The Strong Cities, Strong Communities Visioning Challenge (SC2 Pilot Challenge) is designed to assist cities experiencing chronic economic distress with leveraging innovative ideas and approaches from diverse perspectives to create and adopt actionable economic development proposals and plans. These proposals and plans will be based on a comprehensive understanding of local, regional, and global economic realities and aim to foster long-term economic development, job creation, and community prosperity. Each city selected for an award under this FFO will hold challenge competitions that will incentivize teams of professionals from various fields related to economic development (Multidisciplinary Teams) to submit economic development proposals that outline how cutting-edge concepts and ideas could be applied to address the persistent economic development challenges faced by the city.Each city will award financial prizes to the Multidisciplinary Teams submitting the top three economic development proposals as rated by city-selected evaluation panels, and will invite two to six Multidisciplinary Teams to develop robust economic development plans, which will provide greater detail on the strategies that each city should employ to adopt the innovative ideas contained in the submitted economic development proposals. The Multidisciplinary Team submitting the highest ranked economic development plan is expected to receive a financial prize. The ultimate product under this FFO will be a set of strategies derived from submitted economic development plans that meet the specific needs of each recipient city. See section II.B of this FFO for additional information.The anticipated project period for the SC2 Pilot Challenge is 18 months, and will begin on October 1, 2012.

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