Every year about this time, ACT Rochester releases what it calls a Community Report Card: a look at the overall health of the nine-county Greater Rochester region.
Using data compiled by the Center for Governmental Research, ACT looks at everything from support for the arts to unemployment rates and residents’ actual physical health. And comparing the newest data to those of past years, ACT gives us a sense of how we’re doing, whether things are getting better or worse.
The purpose is not only to share information but also to encourage us to act – in ways that will be successful.
This community doesn’t have a good track record in that area. We brag about how much we give to the United Way, how civic-minded we are. Show us a problem, and a task force will be studying it in the bat of an eye. But we’re long on talk and enthusiasm, short on successful action.
Thus the potential of ACT – a program of the Rochester Area Community Foundation – and its Report Card. If the community has the facts, and looks at where we’re making progress and where we’re not, we at least have the basis for sound action.
So what does the latest ACT Report Card tell us?
There’s certainly some good news in it. Attendance at arts and cultural attractions – in everything from museums, theaters, and dance performances to festivals – has been increasing.
Voter participation is higher than the state average. So is our library usage.
Mortality rates from stroke, heart disease, and cancer are down. The infant mortality rate is down. Only 7 percent of the region’s residents lack health insurance, a rate that’s lower even than the state’s low rate.
But the Report Card’s bad news is very bad. And it’s the same very bad news found in previous reports. The region’s childhood poverty rate, 21 percent, is slightly below the state average. But the rate in the City of Rochester is horrendous: 52 percent. And it’s especially high among African American and Hispanic children.
The region’s overall poverty rate – 14 percent – is up, but it’s less than the state and national rates. The city’s poverty rate, however, is 33 percent.
Seventy-three percent of families in the City of Rochester are headed by single parents – a condition we know is closely related to multi-generational poverty.
I asked Tom Argust, who chairs the ACT advisory committee, whether he found any surprises in the latest report. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s pretty much the same. We’re treading water.”
Treading water.
It’s important that ACT puts out these numbers every year, but, as Argust notes, “that’s not the whole story.”
“The story is what we do with this data,” he said. “Can we say that it’s pushing some kind of major change in this community?”
It’s not that we’re doing nothing. At an event unveiling the latest report on Friday, ACT celebrated some individual actions that are making a difference, thanks to data that highlighted particular needs: a major cooperative effort in Yates County, for instance, that is resulting in a food pantry and other help for the poor.
Those kinds of individual efforts are important. But we’re still waiting for major change. We have to lift the poor – the largest number of whom are concentrated in the City of Rochester – out of poverty.
The ACT report says the region’s median household income has declined 15 percent since 2000. But business leaders have opposed raising the minimum wage.
Our latest effort to reduce poverty, the two-year-old Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, has been heavy on process, light on major, concrete action.
And nobody seems willing to address the key challenge: the concentration of our poverty.
We’ve had the evidence about our poverty for years. At some point, we have to summon the will to do what ACT’s name implies that we’ll do: Act.
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This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2017.
I believe many people are working to address the needs of people in poverty. If we are to continue to take action we’ll have to see more of these reports. It’d be best if we didn’t take each individual report as an indictment of the effort to solve entrenched poverty. Repeated calls to action are the job of the media. This article, however, has no reference beyond the ACT report and the ACT advisory committee chair. Unless you count the disgust of the author that action hasn’t been taken. It’s useful to review these reports when they come out, but repeating the same calls for action dulls the senses and makes the problem seem intractable. I’d like to see a response from someone who has had success in this area. Maybe include it in the next ACT article. Most likely it’ll be very similar next year.
Reports like this should be an indictment of the effort. They simply show that the effort was a failure. They also show that 60 years of the same types of efforts are failures. A failure is just as important as a success because they help you to decide what you should not do.
For some reason, with poverty, we confuse intention with results. The results have been disastrous, yet the solution always seems to be to do more of what failed last time.
Leftist philosophers and politicians consider themselves virtuous when they suggest socialist policy. They completely ignore two facts: 1) For 70 years, Socialist systems around the world have produced more poverty than any other system besides dictatorship. 2) Free market systems have produced the largest uplifting of the common man than any other system in history. Standards of living and freedoms produced are unrivaled.
Each system can be argued to be unfair in some way. Free markets because some benefit more than others and Socialists because a few benefit enormously while nearly everyone else become destitute.
If the focus was actually on helping the poor, we should start by asking, “In the history of the world, what system has helped the common man more than any other?” And ” Is any other system even close?” The answer is clearly: free markets and no, nothing comes close.
No matter how you feel about that truth, if you suggest an alternative, you are not trying to solve the problem, and you are not learning from failures.