$10-Million Obama Proposal Hopes to Export Success of Harlem Program

Editor’s Note: This story is part of an ongoing series.

Harlem Children’s Zone is one of the most lauded — and emulated — charities in the country. Nonprofit groups and government agencies regularly send emissaries to Harlem to study the organization’s acclaimed poverty-fighting strategy, which involves providing a comprehensive set of educational, medical, and social services to children and their parents in a designated neighborhood.

‘Promise Neighborhoods’

Now the spotlight is set to shine even brighter. President Obama, who has been praising the Harlem charity since he announced his presidential bid, is working to export the group’s approach to other parts of the country. He has proposed spending $10-million in the 2010 fiscal year on planning grants to help nonprofit groups create what he calls “Promise Neighborhoods” in 20 cities — a budget request that is now working its way through Congress.

The prospect of federal help is music to the ears of many organizations that have been inspired by the successes of Harlem Children’s Zone and its charismatic leader, Geoffrey Canada — who has been the subject of many news-media profiles and a book, Whatever It Takes, by Paul Tough, a New York Times Magazine editor.

The big question charities now face: Can a project tailored to the needs of children in central Harlem be transported to cities with different geographic and political makeups — and no Geoffrey Canada?

Some weary antipoverty activists hope so. Lisa Early, director of families, parks, and recreation for the city of Orlando, Fla., says that after reading an article about Mr. Canada five or six years ago, she decided perhaps he had what she calls a magic bullet. At the time, the city’s mayor, Buddy Dyer, was leading an effort to combat problems like school dropout rates, juvenile crime, and teenage pregnancy in the Parramore Heritage neighborhood.

No matter what nonprofit groups and government agencies did to try to improve things there, Ms. Early says, “we kept seeing the same numbers.”

She visited Harlem Children’s Zone, met with Mr. Canada, and now directs a project called the Parramore Kidz Zone, which started in 2006 with city money as well as $500,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a matching amount from several local foundations.

A coalition of nonprofit and religious groups, government representatives, and residents are guiding the effort. Services offered include after-school programs, child care, health care, programs to make sure young people finish high school, and a network of “block captains” who propose ways to improve conditions for neighborhood children.

The neighborhood has already seen some improvements, according to independent evaluations — for example, better reading and math scores, fewer arrests of young people, and fewer teenagers getting pregnant.

Offering Guidance

Nonprofit and political leaders in dozens of other cities are exploring ways to adapt the Harlem Children’s Zone model to their neighborhoods. The projects carry names like Focus: Hope Neighborhood Project (Detroit); the East Durham Children’s Initiative (North Carolina); the Miami Children’s Initiative and West Palm Beach Family Zone (Florida); and the San Fernando Valley Poverty Initiative (California).

Interest is so high that Harlem Children’s Zone and PolicyLink, a social-justice research group, are sponsoring a major two-day conference in New York in November to offer guidance to people who have started, or would like to start, a project like Harlem Children’s Zone. The conference, which is expected to draw more than 1,000 people, is an outgrowth of the Practitioners Institute, which the Harlem charity started in 2005 to offer workshops to the many people asking to visit.

Mr. Canada, who was raised in the South Bronx, started the Harlem neighborhood project in 1997, building up a network of social services designed to guide a child’s development from birth to college in a 97-block area of Harlem. The services include a Baby College to train parents of small children, a pre-kindergarten program, five Promise Academy charter schools, after-school programs, a college-success office, an employment and technology center, and a program to organize tenant and block associations.

About a third of the group’s budget of more than $70-million comes from the government, the rest from private sources.

Hubie Jones, a longtime Boston community activist, led a group of nonprofit leaders on a visit to Harlem in May, hoping to lay the groundwork for a Promise Neighborhood in his city. But he says Boston will require a different approach from that taken by Mr. Canada.

“He basically went in and built his own system, which he commands and controls,” Mr. Jones says. By contrast, he says, the Boston effort will have to take into account the many nonprofit groups that are already operating.

Harlem Children’s Zone says projects do not have to copy its specific programs to succeed and should be adapted to fit the local circumstances. (In fact, it prevents other cities from using the term “children’s zone” in their names because the Harlem charity has trademarked the phrase.)

But it says other cities can find success if they follow some core principles.

For example, a project should establish a “pervasive presence” in the neighborhood, reaching about 65 percent of its children to create a “tipping point” in cultural norms. It should also place a heavy emphasis on evaluation of what works and what doesn’t.

Kate Shoemaker, the group’s policy director, advises groups to raise enough money to spend $3,500 a year for each participating child and adult. She says neighborhood nonprofit groups, not government bodies, should take the lead — and no more than two-thirds of revenue should come from the government.

“By design, [a government] administration shifts every few years,” she says. “There is a 10-year horizon for setting up something like this.”

In the absence of Geoffrey Canada, a city should look for strong neighborhood leaders, says Patrick Lester, senior vice president for public policy at United Neighborhood Centers of America, an umbrella group for neighborhood social-service centers. “All things equal, you want to have someone well connected to the community, who knows the politics,” says Mr. Lester. His group’s blog, Building Neighborhoods, tracks news about Promise Neighborhoods.

Money Concerns

The projects emerging across the country are all taking slightly different shapes. In Minneapolis, a foundation helped light the spark. In late 2007, the McKnight Foundation, along with a local group called the NorthWay Community Trust, invited representatives of organizations working in Minneapolis’s troubled north side to watch a segment of the television program 60 Minutes about Mr. Canada.

“There was a lot of institutional will to do something different in the way we do business in nonprofits and the schools,” says Michelle Martin, executive director of the Peace (Public Engagement and Community Empowerment) Foundation. Minnesota has one of the nation’s largest academic-achievement gaps between black and white children — and much of that plays out in North Minneapolis.

The Peace Foundation is now co-manager of the Northside Achievement Zone, a coalition of more than 50 social-service, educational, religious, and arts groups that began work this year by knocking on doors throughout the “zone” to sign up families for services and map out neighborhood characteristics (home foreclosures, neighborhood leaders, families with children).

The project has $500,000 from the NorthWay Community Trust, which provides money and other help to foster collaboration among groups providing services on the north side.

As antipoverty leaders ponder whether they have finally found that “magic bullet,” money remains a prime concern. Bill Stanfield, chief executive of the Metanoia Community Development Corporation, in North Charleston, S.C., says he and others who are advising the county school district on how to become a Promise Neighborhood are concerned about long-term financing.

“It could do a great deal of harm if you put all this money into the community, then pull it out,” he says.

“I hope that the Obama administration understands it’s going to take real money to do this well,” says Angela Glover Blackwell, PolicyLink’s chief executive.

In fact, the $10-million in planning grants for 2010 are a drop in the bucket of money that Mr. Obama initially said the 20 Promise Neighborhoods would require: billions of dollars a year, with half coming from the government and half from philanthropies and businesses.

Ms. Blackwell, who studied ways the Harlem Children’s Zone approach could be adapted to other neighborhoods for a document that was provided to President Obama’s transition advisers, says she agrees with the decision to pick 20 cities to start with, because they can demonstrate that the approach can work outside of Harlem.

But eventually, she says, “this should be the way [all] communities support children.”