The Academy faculty will include RHI's senior staff to guide discussion and assist you and your team to develop the foundation of a comprehensive action plan.
Alicia Scholer has 16 years of experience with RHI and is responsible for communications, project management, content writing and service delivery. She has written action plan reports for over twenty city assessments and seminars in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Resources she has developed include best practice guides for city planners, police, business district managers, and hospitality industry professionals. Publications she co-wrote include Public Safety and Policing in Nightlife Districts and The Sociable City Guide for College Communities.
The publication she co-developed, Planning, Managing, and Policing Hospitality Zones: A Practical Guide, was named one of the ten most essential prevention publications by the International Harm Reduction Association. Among her current areas of focus is how to design downtown nightlife through the lens of women’s safety and comfort.
Jocelyn Kane is RHI’s senior policy advisor following 15 years with the San Francisco Entertainment Commission, including eight years as Executive Director.
Among many firsts, she was responsible for developing and implementing San Francisco’s “agent of change” policy preserving harmony between neighbors and nightlife. She also initiated the Economic Impact of San Francisco’s Nightlife Industry, one of the first economic impact studies of nightlife in the country.
The Commission has been a template for cities worldwide and pre-dates the current movement for an office and staff on nightlife.
She served as a consultant on RHI’s global projects in Toronto and Dublin. She helped the city of Austin update their sound ordinance and currently co-facilitates city assessments, including most recently, St. Augustine, Des Moines, and Savannah.
Finally, she led the development of a four city analysis for the City of Milwaukee on the history and structure of their city's office/staff on nighttime economy management. The four cities included New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC.
The Sociable City Academy welcomes guest faculty to bring insights on strategies to revitalize their nighttime social economy, systems put in place to sustain businesses, and strategies to maximize public safety resources, both public and private, to welcome residents and visitors back to their city centers.
Before founding RHI, Peters served in many hospitality roles (bartender, server, chef, manager, owner, consultant) and sectors (hotel, restaurant, bar, music/disco). His degree is in hospitality management, and he was a social issues editor for Restaurant Business in the 1980s with featured articles on alcohol service and liability, smoking, accessibility, women and minorities in food service, and employee assistance programs.
Since founding RHI, he has joined police ride-alongs and personal outings in active nightlife districts in Santiago, Ibiza, Cape Town, Cancun, London, Dublin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Prague, Paris, Madrid, five cities in New Zealand, five Canadian cities and dozens of cities in the United States. He has also spoken at conferences for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the International Nightlife Association (twice) in Ibiza, Spain and in Colombia, on nighttime safety, and Harm Reduction International (Ibiza, Cape Town), Club Health and highway safety and regulatory conferences.
In his role with RHI, he assisted in development of responsible beverage service (RBS) training standards and legislation, including as a consultant with federally funded research evaluating RBS training and policies. He contributed the responsible business practices defense used in model legislation on alcohol (dram shop) liability. This facilitated the evolution to a public safety and policing strategy in Chicago, becoming a template for Seattle, Edmonton, DC, Charleston, Milwaukee, Cancun, and other cities.
These experiences ore incorporated in RHI's publication of the Public Safety and Policing Nightlife Districts guide in cooperation with the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which was distributed to all its members. This guide was translated into Spanish for the Cancun project and distributed throughout Mexico and Central American cities.
The Sociable City Academy welcomes guest faculty to bring insights on strategies to revitalize their nighttime social economy, systems put in place to sustain businesses, and strategies to maximize public safety resources, both public and private, to welcome residents and visitors back to their city centers.
For RHI's 2021 Sociable City Virtual Summit, five cities prepared a video documentary of their nighttime economy in December 2020. This was a period of lockdown in most of the world, and no widely available vaccines. Music and performance venues were the first to close, with no certainty of when they would open. These four videos paint a disturbing image, yet they also provide testimonials filled with perseverance and drive to return to normal.
