Rochester among 'IBM Smarter Cities' winners

Rochester will receive $500,000 worth of help from a team of IBM executives to help unravel the city's problems with poverty.

The assistance comes through the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge. Rochester is one of only 16 cities in the world to win the competition this year. More than 100 applied.

Detroit, Memphis and Denver are the only other cities in the United States to win in this round.

"I want to thank IBM for seeing something special in our city," Mayor Lovely Warren said at a news conference Tuesday at City Hall.

The Smarter Cities Challenge is IBM's largest philanthropic initiative, said Martin Laird, the technology company's senior manager of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs. Through the program, IBM offers municipal governments help with a range of issues, from job creation to social services to health care.

Here, Warren said the initiative will focus partly on reforming a system of assistance that keeps people on a "treadmill of poverty." Instead, it should offer a stairway out, she said.

A team of six IBM experts will spend about a month working alongside city staff, not including further prep and follow-up work, Laird said. A city news release also said that IBM would help analyze social media to take the pulse of Rochester residents and meet with local officials, citizens, businesses and nonprofits.

The initiative will start in the second half of this year or the first half of 2016.

Ultimately, the IBM team will deliver a set of detailed recommendations to the city, Laird said.

Rochester is not the first municipality in western New York to be named an IBM Smarter City.

Syracuse was a winner in 2011, after seeking help to prevent property vacancies. Buffalo won in 2013, and developed a plan to improve employment opportunities for young people.

The IBM initiative here comes as the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, a group of dozens of government agencies and nonprofits, already is embarking on a region-wide attempt to address local poverty.

Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, and former United Way of Greater Rochester President Peter Carpino launched the initiative earlier this year.

Warren sits on the initiative's steering committee, but she warned last week that she would walk away if she believes that the people hired to be its director and deputy director do not "bring a voice of authenticity" to their roles.

The mayor said Tuesday that the city's latest effort with IBM will dovetail with the anti-poverty initiative. Carpino helped city staff with Rochester's application to the IBM challenge, as did Fran Barrett, the state's interagency coordinator for nonprofit services and chairwoman of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Rochester Anti-Poverty Task Force, the mayor said.

Other past IBM winners include Suffolk County on Long Island, which used the initiative to launch clean-water programs, according to IBM. Another participant — Tainan, Taiwan — secured government funding to expand 4G wireless Internet.

In Birmingham, Alabama, officials who were part of the initiative are rolling out mobile food markets to offer fresh, nutritious food in under-served neighborhoods.

This is the second major private grant the city has received recently. Warren's administration plans to use a $1.9 million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies to launch worker-owned cooperative businesses in a high-poverty section of the city.

DRILEY@DemocratandChronicle.com