The Harlem Revolutionary
Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, had a crazy idea for turning ‘bad kids’ into great students: Invest in them.
By Aarti Shahani
The Harlem Revolutionary
Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, had a crazy idea for turning ‘bad kids’ into great students: Invest in them.
By Aarti ShahaniGeoffrey Canada had a crazy idea: If you want to help kids in poor communities, you have to invest in both the kids and the communities.
He tells Art of Power host Aarti Shahani about how he grew up in poverty in the South Bronx, broke out with the help of a good education, witnessed the lives of the well-to-do, and then came back to the inner-city to build a school system in Harlem — the Harlem Children’s Zone — that at one point earned 100% of his students college acceptance letters.
Recommended reading:
Geoffrey Canada. Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence.
Paul Tough. Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America.
Allen S. Grossman and Daniel F. Curran. Harvard Business Review. Harlem Children’s Zone: Driving Performance with Measurement and Evaluation.
Correction: A previous version of this episode stated Geoffrey Canada grew up in Harlem, New York. He grew up in the South Bronx.