Hopeful

Also on the episode of This American Life I mentioned in the previous post was a long piece by Paul Tough on Geoffrey Canada. Canada is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, a community organization with many programs to help children and their parents thrive in Harlem, and break the cycle of poverty. Tough has written a book about HCZ, Whatever It Takes about Canada by way of five years of research and interviews. Wow, what a story.

From the book blurb: The Harlem Children's Zone "currently serv[es] more than 7,000 children and encompassing 97 city blocks—represents an audacious effort to end poverty within under-served communities. Canada's radical experiment is predicated upon changing everything in these communities—creating an interlocking web of services targeted at the poorest and least likely to succeed children: establishing programs to prepare and support parents," such as Baby College, a nine-week program designed to teach expecting parents the simple lessons that come easy to many middle and upper-class parents like reading to your child and how to discipline them, but hardly penetrate neighbourhoods like Harlem. The results are absolutely stunning. The first children to go through the program have completed their first standardized school tests and all scored higher than the state average. Their parents did not even have the opportunity to go to Baby College before the children were born. Tough expects that children whose parents have graduated from Baby College before they are born will do even better.

Tough's pieces for The New York Times Magazine can be found here and here (You might need to login). I haven't read it yet but I'm assuming that it's going to be just as inspiring a read as the piece for This American Life was.

How about another blurb? Here's the word from GQ Magazine: "A remarkable book ... a story more gripping and inspiring than you'd imagine social policy could possibly be." And if you don't believe The Gentlemen's Quarterly, go read for yourself: http://www.hcz.org/what-is-hcz/whatever-it-takes

Canada made the impossible happen by making small changes on a large scale.