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Help Plan A City

The Obama Administration’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) initiative was launched in 2011 to strengthen neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions around the country by enhancing the capacity of local governments to develop and execute their economic vision and strategies, providing necessary technical assistance and access to federal agency expertise, and creating new public and private sector partnerships.

The SC2 Challenge is a key component of the SC2 initiative. These competitions are 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.

This website provides a platform for selected communities to administer those prize competitions, in order to collect the best and brightest ideas for economic growth and success from development experts across the nation and around the world.

 

Get Involved

Register today and help revitalize a local economy. For each City, you will find instructions and tools to guide your participation. For every SC2 Challenge, we provide complete transparency. You will understand what is required to participate, how you will be scored, who will assess you, and how your scores will be calculated. We also provide the details of any cash rewards that are available for each competition. Finally, once you've registered, you will join a community of problem solvers, people who are focused on the same challenges as you. You can share your ideas with them and communicate through email, chat, and discussion forums. We hope that you will get involved today by picking one or more cities and developing your plan.

 

Pick A City

You may choose to participate by focusing on one or more of the following Cities.