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Harlem Children’s Zone

The Harlem Children’s Zone is an organization that resulted from the Harlem Children’s Zone Project.  This project was a unique, holistic approach to rebuilding a community so that its children could stay on track through college and become productive citizens in the job market.  The HCZ focuses on helping children, their families and the community.  Geoffrey Canada, the CEO, has reworked the strategy.  The strategy is to assist children by creating what they called a ‘conveyor belt” to take children and their parents from baby college to college.  The HCZ teach the parents to care for their children as they prepare their children for success, and this is done at the earliest possible age so that they can impact the children when they are easiest to touch (http://www.hcz.org).

                The Harlem Children’s Zone has several programs that are included within their Early Childhood, Elementary School, Middle School, High School, prep for College, Family, Community, and Health, and Promise Academy charter Schools programs.  Another program that is very interesting to me is The Baby College.  This program is a nine (9) week program that works with expecting parents and those who are raising children up to three years of age.  It teaches the parents the importance of reading and it also teaches them how to use verbal discipline over corporal punishment.  They also promote a program that they call Get Ready for Pre-K program.  This program takes the children that will be enrolling in the fall to the Pre-Kindergarten program on a six week journey to prepare them for kindergarten.  I think that this is really great.  Another program is called the Harlem Gems.  This program is for pre-kindergarten children.  This program is designed to get these students ready for the kindergarten.  This program has three sites.  As you can see the Harlem Children’s Zone’s CEO and his staff are committed to assisting all children is reaching their full potential. 

            One issue that this organization has dealt with is poverty in the Harlem communities.  This is one of the main reasons this community based organization created the Harlem Children’s Project.  The Harlem Children’s Zone believed that the citizens in our country could not rely on the various programs that are offered to save children in the various communities (http://www.hcz.org).  This program assists over 10,000 children each year and has even communicated with other communities about creating programs similar to the Harlem Children’s Zone.  The Harlem Children’s Zone is winning the war over poverty.

            From studying this organization I also learned that the Harlem Children’s Zone is also diversity focused which is one of the topics we discussed in our lesson for this week.  The link for the Harlem Children’s Zone is http://www.hcz.org.

 

Reference

Retrieved from the Harlem Children’s Zone website http://www.hcz.org