February 17, 2021 — A project team led by E4TheFuture and UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center won a $50,000 National Science Foundation award with its plan to develop a mobility hub strategy for Providence, Rhode Island and the Blackstone River Valley. The project goal is to overcome a spatial mismatch between low-to-moderate income housing and area jobs.
The Civic Innovation Challenge named E4TheFuture’s team as one of the 52 selected teams across 30 states and tribal regions, Washington DC and Puerto Rico for Stage 1 of the Challenge. The Challenge seeks to empower communities by establishing research partnerships that can achieve local impacts and potentially be scaled up regionally or nationally.
Steve Cowell, president of E4TheFuture, said, “We are excited to engage with our research, civic, and community partners to identify clean transportation and mobility strategies to help connect affordable housing and good jobs, improving access to better quality of life.”
Led by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the competition’s Track A is supported by NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Projects in Track A seek to develop mobility hubs, test micro transit and ridesharing approaches, develop analytical tools to uncover spatial mismatch, and more. After four months NSF will select Stage-2 awardees for awards of up to $1 million for ready-to-implement pilot projects with the potential to produce scalable, sustainable, and transferable solutions.
E4TheFuture’s project team is multidisciplinary: Academic partners (University of California, Berkeley plus Brown University and Boston University); community organizations (Building Futures RI); a mobility operations consultant (Mobility Development) and local affordable housing community-based organizations (Preservation of Affordable Housing and NeighborWorks).