By: Greg Hanscom


illustration by Harry Campbell


In the early 1990s, Geoffrey Canada was the president of a nonprofit that operated a handful of programs for young people in New York City. The organization, called the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, ran after-school programs, a truancy prevention program, anti-violence training. It was good work, and Canada was being rewarded for it with grants from foundations and government agencies and heart-warming tales of inner city kids getting the love and attention they deserved. He was plenty busy.

But something ate at Canada. He didn’t seem to be making a dent in the problem that underlaid all the others: Intergenerational poverty hung over parts of the city like smog. Almost two-thirds of the kids in central Harlem lived below the poverty line, and three-quarters of them scored below grade level on state reading and math tests. “We thought we were making some progress,” Canada recalls. “But when we looked at the data, it was clear that the problem was worse than ever.”

Canada, who had launched himself from a poor neighborhood in the Bronx to an elite New England college and then the Harvard School of Education, wanted to know what it would take to give these kids the same opportunities he’d had—and not just the handful his nonprofit served, but every kid in the neighborhood. “It was really the issue of scale,” he says. “The small number of families we were working with was insufficient to move the needle. You can’t do gang prevention, you can’t do teen pregnancy prevention, you can’t do early childhood education, in isolation. Because the challenges beset every stage of child’s life, we decided we had to look at the community writ large.”

In 1997, Canada launched an experiment he called the Harlem Children’s Zone, covering twenty-four blocks that were home to roughly three thousand children. Within that area, he set out to change everything about the experience of growing up, creating a nurturing, healthy, academically rigorous environment for kids from birth all the way to college. In 2000, he created “Baby College,” a nine-week program to teach expectant parents and those with kids younger than 3 about early childhood development and good parenting skills. The next year, the organization created the Harlem Gems preschool program and a program aimed at helping families manage childhood asthma. In 2004, it launched a charter school called Promise Academy and a childhood obesity prevention program. To improve living conditions, the organization helped tenants rehab apartment buildings.


Asked where she imagines 2-year-old Ty’ajah in 15 years, Lashaunda Manuel, 17, says, “Still in high school. On her way to college. And not having babies—not most of the stuff I did.” | photo by Valerie Paulsgrove


Taken alone, none of these programs was unusual. What distinguished the Harlem Children’s Zone was that Canada fit them together into an interlocking whole, so that a family entering the program stayed in. And he went to great lengths to draw them in, sending recruiters door to door and offering free meals and other incentives to attend the programs—all in an effort to change the overall culture of Harlem to one where kids stood in the center, not at the fringe. And from the start, Canada worked with unblinking focus to measure the results of his transformation. “You’ve got to be willing to collect and be honest about data,” he says. “And people have to be willing to change based on the data, in real time. Regardless of the plan, when new issues come out, you have to have the ability to adapt.”

Canada has said that his mission is to get the kids in his programs to reach “escape velocity”—the speed an object needs to reach to overcome gravity and go into orbit. The Harlem Children’s Zone, he says, launches kids beyond the gravitational pull of the neighborhood’s crime, poverty, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy. And, if test scores are any indication, it works. A preliminary study of the Harlem Children’s Zone by Harvard economists Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, released this spring, shows that by the time its students reach elementary school, the program has closed the persistent “achievement gap” between black and white students in both math and English. By middle school, the achievement gap has actually been reversed: On math tests, Children’s Zone students outperform the average white student in New York City.

The Harlem Children’s Zone now covers ninety-seven blocks, serving eight thousand children with its pipeline of programs. Geoffrey Canada starred in New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough’s 2008 book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. Supporters on both sides of the political spectrum sing his praises. And longtime fan Barack Obama has made the Harlem Children’s Zone a centerpiece in his administration’s efforts to combat urban poverty. Under the banner of “Promise Neighborhoods,” the president has pledged to create twenty more “children’s zones” nationwide. The Department of Education is due to unveil applications in the spring for what Obama has estimated will total “a few billion dollars a year.”

So next fall, in twenty lucky neighborhoods, the heavens will open and money will rain down, bringing with it a miracle cure for one of the nation’s most insidious ills. Baltimore, where several proposals are in the works, seems like a prime candidate. But the road to a local children’s zone is littered with obstacles—many of our own making.



The Harlem Children’s Zone experience begins with a scene something like this one, which plays out in a tidy classroom at the Park Heights Family Support Center in West Baltimore: As a siren wails outside, child development specialist Michelle Hanna welcomes seven women—mothers and mothers-to-be—to the second of twelve weekly parenting classes. She asks if anyone can tell her what the day’s theme, “nurturing,” means. After a long silence, a young mom named Lashaunda Manuel, dressed in a sharp white-collared shirt and black vest, pipes up: “It means caring, supportive, loving.”

Hanna writes these words on the blackboard, adding “stimulating” and “emotionally attentive.” Ignoring the hip-hop ring tone that erupts from someone’s bag, she passes out markers and asks the women to divide a piece of paper into four boxes. In the first box, she has them write “nurturer” and then jot down some examples of what that means, or, if they prefer, draw a picture. In the second box, they write “bully” and repeat the process. The third box is for “victim” and the fourth for “nurtured.”

“I think we all have a little of each of these traits now and then,” Hanna says.

After a few minutes, Hanna asks Seletta, who has a 1-year-old son, to share what she has written. Seletta’s boxes are filled with simple stick figures. She starts with her “nurtured” box. “My father used to walk me to school,” she says, smiling a little. “I felt safe walking with my father.” In the “nurturer” box, she’s drawn a picture of herself reading a book to her son and “watching him go to sleep.” Then there’s the “bully” box, which shows two stick figures, one with a gun, and dotted lines shooting toward the other. A third stick figure lies on the ground. “That’s me robbing somebody, and a police light,” she says, “and my son is watching, and then I’m dead.”

“Why would you draw that?” Hanna asks.

“I was in a gang,” Seletta says simply.

“That’s where you were,” Hanna says. “That’s not where you are now?”

“Yeah,” Seletta says. “Yeah.”

“Thank you for sharing that,” Hanna says.

Later, the students take turns reading from a handout about children’s physical and intellectual development. One entry begins, “The child whose needs are met, whose discomforts and fears are quickly removed, who is held, loved, played with, and talked to develops a belief that the world is a safe place, and that people are dependable and helpful. The child who receives inconsistent care and who is rejected develops a basic mistrust of others.”

As the lessons wrap up, Hanna opens the floor to questions. “How do you get patience?” asks one mother. “How do you potty train a boy?” asks another. Hanna counsels the women to remember that their kids are individuals, on their own time schedules, not to be rushed. She encourages them to talk with their children, even in the womb, to have family meals together each day, and to stay together with the fathers of their kids. “If you’ve got a piece of family that’s working,” she says, “you do whatever it takes to keep that family together.”



The class, and others like it around Baltimore, look a lot like the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “Baby College.” But the similarities end there.

After completing Baby College, parents in the Harlem Children’s Zone would immediately be ushered into another series of parenting and childhood development seminars. Their child would be enrolled in a pre-kindergarten program that runs from 8 in the morning until 6 at night, five days a week, and includes lessons in English, Spanish, and French. Once reaching the Children’s Zone’s charter schools, that child would be committed to extended school days, Saturday study sessions, and a longer-than-usual school year that runs from September to early August. Outside the schools, the family would have access to counseling and legal consultation, as well as health services. The program has become so popular that there is a long waiting list to get in.

In Baltimore, in contrast, the Park Heights Family Support Center and other programs like it struggle just to hang on to a few committed individuals, says Linda Harvey, the Family Support Center’s director. “Last week, there were five people” in the parenting class, she says. “This week there may be ten. Next week, three.”

The mothers—fathers rarely attend—come for different reasons. Some, like Lashaunda Manuel, who became pregnant in eighth grade and dropped out of school, come for the GED prep classes and the free meals and childcare. Some are sent by a judge following child abuse cases. Others are in the midst of custody battles and think a parenting class will help their cases. But the forces pulling parents away, ranging from drug addiction to the demands of raising children or their own younger siblings, are often overpowering.

“We have open enrollment. We never turn anyone down,” Harvey says. “But most of them, they’re gung ho this week, and then in three weeks we never see them again.” For those parents who stick with it, the staff at the Family Support Center provides direction to preschools and Head Start programs. Harvey has some dramatic success stories. But low-income families often move frequently, the programs are scattered, and Harvey says she doesn’t have the resources to track families after they leave. “The Harlem Children’s Zone absorbs the child into the system. More importantly, it forces the parent to be accountable,” she says. “Our program can’t do that—take the child all the way from birth to college. We just don’t have the money.”

Plenty of childhood and family resources exist in Baltimore, but navigating the maze of services can be confounding for parents. “If you pick up a tennis ball in West Baltimore, South Baltimore, East Baltimore, and throw it, you’re either going to hit a social worker or a nonprofit or an agency designed to ‘help the poor,’” says Ed Burns, former city police officer and public school teacher and, famously, David Simon’s collaborator on the book The Corner and the HBO series The Wire. “They’re like weeds. But nothing ever really changes, because they are [isolated] programs.”

Burns, who now lives in Martinsburg, West Virginia, compares a kid growing up in the streets, attending one of these many programs, to a seedling: “Take it and nurture it for six months, and then put it in the closet for a year. Take it out and nurture it some more, then back to the closet,” he says. “You’re not going to get much of a plant.” He saw the results firsthand in the classroom. “When I was teaching [in Baltimore City], most of my kids, who were between 14 and 18, had the eyes of old people,” he says. “Nobody had lit a fire when the fire was there to be lit.”

Burns first learned about the Harlem Children’s Zone in the mid-1990s when he was working on a proposal to create a kind of urban kibbutz—a safe space for children to develop, insulated from the drugs and violence of the streets. (See Urbanite, March ’07.) He worked with both the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University to create some sort of a children’s zone here. “Unfortunately, that line that runs down the middle of Baltimore—Charles Street—kept the two programs apart,” he says. “We never got to a working model.”

But now, the prospect of federal Promise Neighborhood funding has breathed new life into efforts to create a more coherent system for Baltimore’s kids. Canada has visited Baltimore at the invitation of local leaders, and university and nonprofit delegations have trekked to Harlem to check out his project. The city will be well represented this month at a conference hosted by the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City on November 9 and 10. But thus far, Baltimore is offering anything but a united front. There are at least four Promise Neighborhood proposals in the works: The mayor’s office has been working on one in Park Heights; the nonprofit Living Classrooms is involved with another; and the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins are each pushing proposals as well.


“We can’t do East Baltimore and West Baltimore,” says the University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth. “There’s 25,000 just in our little Promise Heights area.” | photo by Valerie Paulsgrove


University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth says the school is designing a “parent university” program akin to Baby College and is meeting with community groups to talk about creating a tapestry of interlacing children’s services within “Promise Heights”—a five-neighborhood zone comprising Druid Heights, Upton, Sandtown-Winchester, Harlem Park, and Poppleton. He envisions a system that would prepare local kids for the university’s science and technology programs, including one that trains the type of technicians who work in the university’s swelling biotechnology apparatus. “Ideally, before too long, we would have kids who could grow up in West Baltimore, get a good education in the schools of West Baltimore and at the University of Maryland, and then get good jobs in West Baltimore,” he says.

Much of the groundwork has already been laid, according to Rev. Alvin Hathaway of Union Baptist Church in Upton. The DRUM Healthy Families center, created in 2003, provides support for pregnant mothers and offers parenting and early childhood development classes. Union Baptist has been providing Head Start preschool classes for forty-one years; it’s one of the oldest programs of its kind in the country. The Harvey Johnson Center in the church annex provides after-school programs, a computer lab, and recreational activities. “The [University of Maryland] has always been involved here, but there has never been a focus around transforming a community,” Hathaway says. “Now we’re starting to talk this way.”

Across town, the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute and East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) have been involved in talks about creating a community-level support network for children in East Baltimore. Institute Director Robert Blum says the network begins with urban health workers, local residents trained at Hopkins who reach out to expectant mothers, providing in-home visits and connecting them to prenatal care. Blum is leading a group that is talking about the second piece: providing care for kids up to 4 years old. Grade schoolers can now attend the East Baltimore Community School, a public “contract school” that works under an “expeditionary learning” model, providing math, social studies, and English lessons that revolve around a common theme. (This semester’s theme is “What happens when communities change?”) To buoy up the academics, EBDI has launched “Elev8 Baltimore,” part of a national initiative that provides before- and after-school and summer programs, youth mentoring programs, health services, and education for parents.

“Right now, we have a lot of individual initiatives,” Blum says. “What really needs to happen, to ensure that kids don’t fall between the cracks, is to tie it all together.”



The key problem is that a tightly woven safety net is tremendously expensive. The Harlem Children’s Zone was born in Wall Street’s heyday. Contributors included the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. Before the meltdown, Wall Street was contributing upwards of $15 million a year to the organization’s $68 million annual budget. Canada was able to win that support by appealing to donors’ business sensibilities: It’s cheaper to provide kids with a healthy upbringing, he argued, than to lock them up later. But with Wall Street philanthropy on the wane, Canada has had to lay off staff and rein in expansion plans.

Another important question about cloning the Children’s Zone concerns its founder: How much of the Harlem success is due to the charisma and leadership of one man? Making something like this work will require someone who can rally a community, raise money, and knock down the walls that separate government agencies and nonprofits. “I would love to see [a children’s zone] in Baltimore,” Linda Harvey says. “I just don’t know that we have a Geoffrey Canada here.”

Money and leadership are crucial, Canada acknowledges. But, asked if the Harlem Children’s Zone model is replicable, he replies, “Absolutely.” Still, he cautions, “We are really not encouraging people to replicate programs. We’re encouraging them to replicate strategies.” He urges community leaders to create well thought-out business plans and systems of data collection and accountability. Above all, Canada is an advocate of “pipelines”: “You can’t work with kids for a short period and think that is going to be powerful enough,” he says. “You have to maintain a relationship with the child and family.”

One of the greatest challenges of this type of approach, Canada says, is deciding who wins the lottery and gets all the resources. “This is where you get into politics—one neighborhood gets it and all the others are outraged,” he says. “One day we will have the technology to do this in all of Baltimore, but right now the challenge is creating a zone around a community where you can ensure that families can get their needs met.”

And therein lies the real heartbreak of Promise Neighborhoods. “If they [the Department of Education] describe it as a place-based intervention for a modest number of children or families—20,000, say—we can’t do East Baltimore and West Baltimore,” says the University of Maryland’s Barth. “There’s 25,000 just in our little Promise Heights area.” If the application allows for cross-border networks and collaboration, he says he would be happy to work with Hopkins, as he does on any number of other issues. But in all likelihood, each institution will ally with its side of the city to craft a separate application. The mayor’s office and Living Classrooms could send in their own proposals, too. With luck, one neighborhood will win.

Those who end up outside the zone may be able to borrow elements from the Harlem model. Ron Haskins, a researcher with the Brookings Institution who was an educational advisor to George W. Bush, notes that the recent Harvard study revealed that even kids who come to Children’s Zone schools from outside the neighborhood (by law, enrollment is decided by citywide lottery) are excelling on achievement tests, suggesting that the revamped schools alone might be doing the trick. “It sounds like a magical thing: You’re going to change the whole neighborhood,” Haskins says. “But this paper gives you hope that fixing the schools, being aggressive with parents, and focusing like a laser on achievement tests can produce results.”

In Baltimore, of course, the public schools are in the midst of a major overhaul under whip-cracking schools CEO Andrés
Alonso, who has cleared out dead wood, shuttered underperforming schools, and put a new emphasis on early childhood education. (See Urbanite, September ’09.) Alonso, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City school system, likes the idea of a children’s zone but stresses the distinction between the two cities. “The constraints are completely different. The opportunities are different, too,” he says. “The conversation here in Baltimore is as much about integration of services.”

Alonso welcomes federal funding that would help energize that integration. “In an ideal world, there is a seamless progression of kids through the different stages and institutions, with an approach that reaches out to families, not just children,” he says. “But I don’t think that it needs to happen through a children’s zone approach.”

Geoffrey Canada holds fast to his argument that schools are only part of the formula and that a holistic, community-wide initiative is the only way out. “The essence to me is that Americans aspire to live in decent communities,” he says. “These are just places where basic services and supports are in place. We don’t need the PhDs and evaluations from Harvard to say that a child with a toothache is not going to do as well [in school] as a child without one. Any of us who’ve been parents understand why these basic core things are important to children.”



Each morning from Monday through Thursday, Lashaunda Manuel rouses herself and her 2-year-old daughter, Ty’ajah, before dawn. She leaves the Owings Mills house where she lives with her father and stepmother and walks to a bus stop, riding a bus to the Metro, then a second bus to Park Heights, where she is often the first one to arrive at the Family Support Center.

Manuel, 17, has earned certificates in parenting and child development and is preparing for her GED test. Sitting at the center’s butcher-block table, still sticky with syrup from the morning’s waffles, she says she wants to become a nurse. She says she has tried to stay in touch with Ty’ajah’s father, but their plans to spend weekends together haven’t panned out. He’s been back in school, thinking about job corps. And in addition to working on her GED and raising Ty’ajah, she’s helping raise her younger sister and brother, as her mother has fallen on hard times.

The odds are stacked against her, but Manuel is determined to provide a better life for her daughter than the one she has cobbled together so far. Asked where she imagines Ty’ajah in fifteen years, Manuel says, “Still in high school. On her way to college. And not having babies—not most of the stuff I did.”

But first, she needs to take that next step. Manuel says she hopes to have her own place in a few months, after she gets her GED and is no longer eligible for the Family Center’s services.

Later, while her mother studies, Ty’ajah and three other preschoolers take a walk in the chilly fall breeze with two matronly staffers from the Family Support Center. Ty’ajah wears clean white tennis shoes, a flowery pink shirt, and multicolored plastic barrettes in her tidy cornrows. She has her mom’s cheeky smile and a hard time keeping her thumb out of her mouth.

The four kids walk hand-in-hand along the sidewalk like a pack of little astronauts exploring a new world. They listen to a mockingbird singing from the stone chimney of a neighborhood church, greet a mail carrier in a chorus of squeaky voices, and spot a black-and-white kitten curled up in the weeds in front of a dilapidated house. Around them swirls all the disarray and dysfunction of West Baltimore, but the kids seem oblivious, suspended in their bright bubbles.

Then Ty’ajah spots something in the strip of grass between the street and sidewalk. She crouches to inspect a delicate white globe about the size of a marble. She picks it up—a clover blossom—holding the stem tightly in her soft brown hand. “Flower,” she says, beaming, and trundles off into the wind.

—Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor.



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