PROVIDENCE — Election Day was an emotional day for Sal Monteiro Jr., a former inmate at the Adult Correctional Institutions, in Cranston.

Monteiro, who spent 12 years in prison for his role in a Pawtucket murder, strolled into the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School on the East Side with his 3-year-old daughter, Jazelle. Until voters approved a referendum question in 2006, convicted felons were barred from voting in the state. It was Monteiro’s first time in a polling place and he wasn’t sure what to do, but he had no doubt for whom he would cast his vote: Barack Obama.

“It was a very fulfilling experience,” Monteiro said. “This is what I’ve been fighting for.”

Today, Monteiro, 36, works as a case manager at the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, on the South Side. He is on a team of felons and former gang members who intervene in violent disputes between rival gangs in the city’s worst neighborhoods.

The election of Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, has made it easier for him to talk to youth on the city’s mean streets.

“Now, you can be president,” he tells poor black, Latino and Asian kids drifting through life. “It shows a community that change can happen. They feel now that their voice makes a difference.”

Monteiro and others on the frontlines with the city’s troubled, poor and disenfranchised are hopeful that an Obama administration could bode well for the state’s largest city, which has grappled with poverty, poor schools and crime over the past decade.

No one expects things to change overnight, but Mayor David N. Cicilline, Police Chief Dean M. Esserman and Monteiro’s boss, Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, see a brighter future.

Cicilline said he awoke the morning after the election “more optimistic” about the city’s future than he had been at any other point in his six years on the job. He says Obama understands the plight facing mayors such as himself and others across the nation: declining tax revenue, cuts in social programs, failing schools and mortgage foreclosures.

Figures provided by the city, show that over the past seven years, federal Community Development Block Grants have been cut 24 percent to $5.7 million, from $7.6 million. As a result, the city has had to cut services at food banks, afterschool programs, daycare centers and senior centers.

Large swaths of the city, away from the bustling downtown, Providence Place mall and the historic East Side, are struggling to make ends meet.

Providence is the third-poorest city in America for youth under the age of 18, and as a result, its teenagers are at a greater risk of being victims of violent crime. The 2000 U.S. Census reported that 40.5 percent of the city’s youth lived in four-person households with an annual family income below $17,500. Only Brownsville, Texas, a hardscrabble city on the Mexican border; and Hartford, Conn., were ranked lower than Providence.

“He’s made it clear: mayors have the most difficult jobs in America,” Cicilline said. “He really gets cities. Cities are where the rubber meets the road. There needs to be a real partnership between local, state and the federal government.”

Esserman said Obama’s election could be a step in the right direction for his department and law enforcement in general. He stayed up after midnight watching Obama’s historic victory speech with his wife, who is Latino, and their two school-age children.

“As an American police chief and an American citizen, that makes me proud,” Esserman said. “Things couldn’t be any worse than what has been going on for the past seven years. This White House has slowly been unwinding its support of American policing and American criminal justice.”

In September, the National Association of Police Organizations, endorsed Obama, citing the work of his running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden, to help law-enforcement agencies nationwide. In recent years, the Bush administration stopped financing the federal Crime Bill, which provided millions of dollars to local police departments.

The Providence police, like many other departments across the country, have been asked to help federal agencies crack down on illegal immigration, gun trafficking and international drug rings. As a result, local police have been stretched thin. Deputy Police Chief Paul Kennedy said that during the past five years, federal grant money for the department has been slashed by $2 million.

Gross, executive director for the nonviolence institute, said he “broke down,” on election night when it became clear that Obama had been elected the nation’s 44th president.

Gross has a stable of felons and ex-convicts who work the city’s streets to intervene in gang disputes and try to curb violence. He spends a lot of time seeking financing for his nonprofit agency, a job that hasn’t gotten any easier in recent years.

He said that there have been major cuts in programs such as Project Safe Neighborhoods and grant money for summer jobs and recreation programs has dried up.

Gross is looking forward to seeing what Obama, a former community organizer in Chicago, plans for his urban policy agenda and for social programs to help the less fortunate.

“Obama will have the best and the brightest address these issues,” Gross said. “We will have a voice now.”

He said that many of the institute’s street workers had doubts that an African-American man could become the most powerful man in the world.

“Many of them felt that the system, at the end, would trick them,” Gross said. “It’s a phenomenal redemption for us. I just feel overwhelmed and I consider myself half a realist.”

bmalinow@projo.com