The city of Sacramento was already using Palo Alto-based UrbanLeap’s “urban innovation platform” to on-board startup companies to SkyDeck, the startup accelerator based at the University of California at Berkeley. The company had helped the city stand up a portal on the Sacramento Urban Technology Lab website, so officials were able to build more quickly on the existing contract than they could have done in a new RFP, Kriztina Palone, workforce development manager in Sacramento’s Office of Innovation and Economic Development. told Techwire. The city began working with the company in July and August, seeking to tailor its platform for use as a place where workforce providers receiving a total of $10 million in CARES funding could input their data, and city officials could view it virtually. UrbanLeap and city staff uploaded all the grantee and provider metrics, and the solution went live in late September, offering a dramatically simplified way to administer the programming — of grant amounts ranging from around $20,000 to $30,000 to roughly $1.7 million, among 29 grantees. Among the takeaways:
- Communication is key. UrbanLeap’s platform helped ease the city’s bureaucratic process tremendously, Palone said, by serving as a central convening point where workforce providers could easily input their data, and city officials could analyze it. “I can’t stress enough how that platform helped us maintain the oversight and administration of our workforce recovery program,” she said, indicating that if additional federal CARES funding is released, the city is considering a “much more targeted and focused workforce programming that’s based on the demand data for our region.”
- Adoptions don’t just happen; orientations are important. Workforce providers had a difficult task of their own, in helping residents recover. In distributing CARES funding, Sacramento found itself working with a number of new providers that had never contracted with the city before — making education on the city’s process vital. An orientation would have been helpful, Palone said, indicating the city is compiling a list for future providers of what they must do in order to contract with the city.
- Understand your entity’s place in any ecosystem where a technology solution could be of help. Sacramento, Palone said, seeks to understand its role in “our larger workforce ecosystem and how we can either complement or supplement and/or foster better collaboration and coordination” and is interested to partner with more experienced workforce entities.
- IT companies that may already be under contract to state or local government might consider staying flexible during the pandemic and re-engaging with those government customers, Holland Barrett White, UrbanLeap’s customer success manager, told Techwire. The company, he said, has had “some great success” in hosting listening sessions with government partners — revealing that many share the same technology issues they’d like to solve and enabling the process of solving for them jointly.
