The City of Rochester, FUSE, and ROC the Future are working together to turn strong but informal collaboration into a formal structure for shared decision-making. ROC the Future, a mature cradle-to-career backbone organization, convenes more than 30 cross-sector partners around milestones like kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading, and high school graduation, and tracks progress on a public dashboard. Even so, sectors such as housing, public safety, business, and early childhood aren’t consistently part of a unified decision-making process, and coordination often depends on personal relationships. These gaps contribute to persistent disparities for Black and Latino children and families, and a Children’s Cabinet would bring the executive-level coordination and accountability needed to close them.
During the first 90 days, FUSE Executive Fellow Kelley Johnson will meet with city leadership, ROC the Future partners, the school district, community organizations, philanthropy, and business leaders, including stakeholders not yet at the table, and will study peer cities with Children’s Cabinets. Johnson will then define the Cabinet’s governance, membership, decision-making, and accountability, strengthen data-sharing agreements, and align initiatives like literacy, community schools, and out-of-school time under a common framework. Johnson will be embedded at the City with a formal dotted-line relationship to ROC the Future. By Fall 2027, deliverables will include a governance and operating framework, a cross-sector data strategy, a citywide asset map, an implementation roadmap, and a sustainability plan, and by Fall 2028, a fully operational Cabinet with measurable progress and a replicable systems alignment model.
