Conversations for Grantmakers: CORe — Community Opportunity and Reinvestment

New York State invests enormous resources in our cities. Despite these significant resources, certain urban neighborhoods face persistent challenges. Those neighborhoods often benefit from strong community engagement, yet they continue to face obstacles such as high crime, high unemployment, low graduation rates, persistent health problems and other indicia of distress.

 

The CORe initiative seeks to better align state support with local need, while supporting successful community-based efforts, to make measurable and sustained progress in improving the outcomes in these communities. Nurse-Family Partnerships, Head Start, mentoring, summer youth programs and others, if knit together from birth to adulthood, inoculate individuals, families and neighborhoods against distress.

 

The Neighborhood CORe initiative has been piloted in Newburgh and Albany over the past year to engage neighborhood residents and local government supported by a state CORe collaboration of ten State agencies across several issue areas, including health services, juvenile justice, labor, public safety, child welfare, substance abuse and economic development. The CORe initiative looks at future city targets of Buffalo, Binghamton, Mt. Vernon, Niagara Falls, Poughkeepsie, Rochester, Schenectady, Syracuse, Troy and Utica.

 

Deputy Secretary of Public Safety Elizabeth Glazer will share their work to provide these local communities with three kinds of resources from the State: 1) a technology solution to individuals with multiple needs in order to engage them earlier and more effectively in services; 2) a community conditions survey tool that identifies opportunities for short-term changes with the real potential to affect long-term change — starting to drive numbers in the right direction while also further engaging the community; and 3) technical assistance to create and support a local CORe team.

 

 

 

A Philanthropy New York Collaborative Program with Grantmakers Forum of New York.

 

 

All interested funders.