Arlington, Texas has won the first ever Sharman Stein Award for Storytelling Change Makers, a new accolade created to highlight local governments doing strong work in communications and resident engagement.
Results for America – the lead partner in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ data-driven local governance initiative What Works Cities – is the creator of the award. Officials with the organization praised the robust and innovative ways Arlington communicates with its residents.
The group specifically pointed to a number of initiatives undertaken by the city. They noted initiatives like creating a news website that posts three to five original stories a day, teaming up with the IT department on projects like informative Amazon Alexa skills, and placing a member of the communications team on Arlington’s data governance committee.
Jay Warren, Director of Communication and Legislative Affairs for the City of Arlington, said he and his team were “honored and humbled” by the recognition. Warren runs a team of eight members, and many of them have backgrounds in local media and journalism. To hear Warren tell it, the city simply identified a need for better pathways of communication, and it moved to fill those gaps by leveraging new and inexpensive forms of communication like social media.