Rochester-Monroe County Anti-Poverty Initiative Proposal
November 26, 2014
Joseph D. Morelle, New York State Assembly Majority Leader
Lovely A. Warren, Mayor, City of Rochester
Peter Carpino, President and CEO, United Way of Greater Rochester
Rochester, New York: A Tale of Two Cities
Rochester has a long and proud history of economic prosperity. From its beginnings as the
nation’s largest flour-producing city and a major trade center along the Erie Canal, Rochester
flourished to become an important industrial center and a leader in the fields of imaging and
optics.
Today, the Rochester and Monroe County community has transitioned from its “Big Three”based economy of Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb to a more diverse economy fueled in part
by innovative start-up companies. Along with imaging and optics, key industries include
photonics, computer and electronic products, health care and advanced manufacturing.
Rochester and Monroe County rank among the world’s best metro economies based on income
and employment, according to the Brookings Institution.
Clearly, great wealth exists here. Yet, today’s Rochester is very much a tale of two cities. One
Rochester is prospering. The other is facing escalating poverty.
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Rochester is the third-poorest city in America among comparably-sized cities
Rochester’s child poverty rate is the second highest in the country, second only to
Detroit
More than 38,000 children in Monroe County live in poverty; the vast majority (an
estimated 26,000) live in Rochester (52 percent of children in the city live in poverty,
more than double the U.S. rate of 20 percent)
Children in the Rochester City School District are the poorest of New York State’s large
urban school districts and of all 430 Upstate New York districts, with 83 percent of
students eligible to receive free or reduced-price meals
Rochester’s infant mortality rate, at 13.7 deaths per thousand, is nearly double the state
average of 5 deaths per thousand and the national average of 6.1 deaths per thousand.
Seeking a Bold Solution
Despite an array of traditional anti-poverty programs and investments to raise families out of
poverty, this community still faces a devastating and accelerating poverty crisis.
Under the leadership of New York State Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, Rochester
Mayor Lovely Warren, and United Way President and CEO Peter Carpino, the community is
uniting in an unparalleled public-private partnership to address this issue, including
government, the Rochester Business Alliance, major foundations, universities, human service
agencies, and others.
In early November 2014, Majority Leader Morelle, Mayor Warren, and Mr. Carpino brought
together 24 individuals from 15 organizations to begin discussions around a community-wide
anti-poverty initiative and the design of a conceptual framework that will allow for bold
innovation, enhancing services proven to work, an unprecedented integration of services
designed with participants at the center and an evaluation of current systems, programs and
policies to gain insight into what is not working.
Participants included: Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks; Rochester Area Community
Foundation President and CEO Jennifer Leonard; Rochester Business Alliance CEO Sandy Parker;
Daan Braveman, RBA board chair and Nazareth College president; Paul S. Speranza, Jr.,
Wegmans Food Markets vice chairman, general counsel, and secretary; University of Rochester
Vice President and COO Peter Robinson; MCC President Anne Kress; The Children’s Agenda
President Larry Marx; Monroe County Human Services Commissioner Kelly Reed; Vinnie
Esposito, director of the NYS Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council; and Karyn
Herman from Action for a Better Community.
This public-private partnership believes that the community can move in a new direction to
address poverty through improvements at the system-of-care level. It envisions a care system
that centers on children and their families, and a community with a variety of doors for access
to support – and once those doors open, all services are integrated and surround these families.
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Such a system would mean holistic and integrated services to support families and guide
them on a pathway out of poverty and into opportunities to succeed by providing
services across traditional boundaries of service. In addition, we will identify policies
and eliminate or change those that create conflicts or barriers to participants making
progress.
Such a vision aligns with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s work to fight the concentration of
poverty in New York State, which has been one of the Governor’s top priorities. The
Governor’s Community, Opportunity, Reinvestment (CORe) initiative, for example, aims
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to better align state support with local need, to achieve measurable and sustained
progress in improving the outcomes in troubled communities.
Under the Governor’s leadership, a new poverty approach in the Rochester region can raise the
hope that a major system redesign can achieve far greater progress than has been achieved
during the last several decades of traditional programs.
This Rochester-Monroe County Anti-Poverty Initiative is a collaborative work of many
organizations under United Way of Greater Rochester’s leadership, which is well-positioned to
lead the charge to create a community response.
Process and Mission Statement
Participants in the November meeting unanimously agreed to go forward with an initiative that
moves our community away from a fragmented and disjointed approach to create a unified
solution. They also drafted the following Mission Statement:
“The Rochester region will eliminate childhood poverty by ensuring that
every child will have the opportunity to achieve the American dream, to
live in a stable family environment where the promise of economic
mobility is a reality.”
Along with a Mission Statement, the group created the following principles to guide our work,
committing to:
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Measuring and being accountable for improved outcomes for children and their families
Engaging and listening to the voices of families
Aligning and linking existing service delivery systems and their funding streams
Prioritizing and being intentional in our implementation
Ensuring equity
Ensuring that our work is sustainable and replicable
Following the initial early November meeting, the group convened a second time on November
21, 2014. At this meeting, the participants of this public-private partnership expanded to
include an additional 35 members (Note: See the attached complete list of members).
The Conceptual Framework: An Innovative, Integrated Comprehensive Approach
Rather than focus on the poverty epidemic programmatically, the public-private partnership
proposes addressing it holistically, through an innovative, integrated, data-driven, and childand family-centered approach focused on outcomes.
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In addition to convening stakeholders, the process will include identifying key problems,
gathering data, soliciting ongoing input and feedback from the community, and developing a
plan. This blueprint – which will evolve as the work progresses − will identify necessary changes,
potential funding sources, and innovative ideas and potential solutions from other
communities. It also will include analysis of current program effectiveness, policy conflicts or
barriers, a survey of other communities’ experiences with reducing poverty, and evidence on
the federal promise-neighborhood approach that emphasizes place-based funding over
problem-based funding.
The primary aim of the approach is to end the cycle of poverty and to create a practical
pathway for families to get out of poverty, focused on five key drivers:
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Jobs
Education and training
Housing
Safe neighborhoods
Health and nutrition
This pathway ultimately involves all 38,000 children and their families gaining access to services
in a new and integrated way to ensure they get the help they need in a seamless and holistic
system of care that is easily accessible – all while having the support of a coach. Equally
important, the pathway will be directed and informed by participants – ensuring that they
create a self-directed plan, with the support of providers, to address their concerns and achieve
their goals.
This system will rely on a new, centralized database to make sure that every opportunity is
provided for the family to succeed. Equally important, the database will track opportunities to
improve the system, programs offered within the system, address policies that are unwittingly
creating barriers to success and, ultimately, create the ability to harness the power of predictive
analytics to guide and support and create efficiencies for the dual-generation system of care.
The test of this approach’s concept phase can begin immediately – focusing and building on
three home visitation models currently in place in Rochester and Monroe County. A team of
professionals has already identified opportunities for improving the home visitation programs,
looking at how to take three distinct programs and integrate them with the family at the center.
This approach will ensure that we build on key elements of the system framework we are
proposing. It will:
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Integrate three current programs with other community support services that are
integral to ensure success for the family – services such as housing, transportation, and
job training and employment.
Allow us the opportunity to develop a centralized assessment of need and create plans
of action for participants. What are their hopes and dreams for themselves and their
children? How can we integrate existing programs in new and enhanced ways to ensure
that participants have the optimal opportunity for success?
Allow us the opportunity to build on the formative data base system we have developed
to track participant outcomes and inform service providers regarding progress toward
goals as well as peer learning opportunities to improve services and outcomes. We will
identify opportunities to improve and enhance the database and, potentially, identify
new partnerships to achieve our vision for this enhance database.
Implement care coordination by utilizing care coordinators, advocates, and mentors.
Enhance how we coordinate services between local community agencies and begin to
push boundaries of service and reimbursements by allowing agencies flexibility to “cross
traditional reimbursement” streams to ultimately offer the ideal service combination to
help participants achieve their goals and progress out of poverty.
A Model for the State
United Way of Greater Rochester, on behalf of the entire community, is seeking support from
New York State for this unique and unified approach to eradicating childhood poverty.
This initiative involves all the leaders of the Rochester and Monroe County community: from
government, business, human services, health care, foundations, and schools and highereducation institutions, and others. With the leadership of Governor Cuomo, and the support
and commitment from the Legislature, Rochester and Monroe County can be a laboratory for
finding an innovative solution to the escalating childhood poverty epidemic.
We believe that this effort can be successful and can serve as a model for other communities
affected by childhood poverty in the state.
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