Representatives from the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative gathered to announce their new Director. Leonard Brock is currently a Director of the Children's Agenda and an Adjunct Professor at Keuka College.
Leaders of the initiative also released the names of the 150 members of the project's six work groups. These members vary from government officials and business owners to volunteers and city residents. New United Way President Fran Weisberg says over 300 people applied to be included in the work groups, intended to be the driving force behind the initiative and its process. Each work group contains between three and five community members, as well as cultural facilitators to aid communication among the individuals that make up these diverse work groups.
Assembly Majority Leader Joe Morelle says the groups will meet "as often as they have to" in order to come up with their first status report in the next few weeks. Work groups are responsible for identifying barriers to rising out of poverty, as well as brainstorming and suggesting strategies for more efficient support and programs to help the working poor. But the first job of the work groups will be to determine the particular measurements of their own success: what results will look like and how to quantify them.
Mayor Lovely Warren says the result she's looking for reduced child poverty.
"Over the last ten years we've gone from being 11th in the nation for childhood poverty, to third. No matter what we've done this far we have not been able to stop this drain that's happening in our community. And so, we have to be able to stop it, and reverse the trend."
The Anti-Poverty Initiative was established with a one-time $500 thousand grant by the state government, and future, ongoing funding has yet to be determined. Morelle says once the groups determine how to measure results and start producing them, he will use those insights to lobby for more funding from the state.
