Need-finding and the Harlem Children's Zone

Tirzah Enumah

NPD Section 2

Best Practice Assignment - Harlem Children’s Zone

The Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is a non-profit organization that provides a comprehensive set of services designed to support low-income children in Harlem (a neighborhood in New York City) from birth through college. Behind HCZ is the philosophy that “it takes a village to raise a child.” As a result, HCZ takes on a holistic approach in mitigating, and ultimately erasing, the effects that poverty has on children in Harlem.

HCZ’s “products” are the services it offers to children and their families in Harlem. The founder and director of HCZ, Geoffrey Canada, develops the programs he offers to his community based on a thorough understanding its needs, both as defined by the community and by poverty research, and this is where I think he and Harlem Children’s Zone excels.

Canada looked at some of the realities in his community: low high school graduation rates, high imprisonment rates, high occurrence of single-parent (and therefore single-income) families, and high unemployment relative to the national average (although that gap may be slightly narrower due to the recession). Many of these are present in other impoverished communities, but there is a lot of controversy around how poverty works and why it affects people the way it does. Canada’s approach to product development uses the more liberal views on poverty, which maintains that poverty is the cause of lower “success” rates (I’m using “success” in the traditional sense here, which means steady job/two-parent family/comfortable income).

The programs HCZ offers attack specific mechanisms in which poverty affects children. For example, there is a lot of research on how language development affects children’s analytical cognitive abilities and their performance in school. There is also research that shows that by the time they are 4 (a whole year before they enter school!) children in middle-class families have significantly better language skills than do children from low-income families. Part of the reason for this is a difference in parenting style—middle-class parents tend to talk to their children more than do lower-income parents. To combat this, then, Canada and his team developed a parenting program for expecting parents and parents of children ages 0-3. (Pricing information is not important to this particular assignment, but all of HCZ’s programs are offered free of charge, and HCZ aggressively markets its programs to the community to increase parents’ access to the programs). The program, called Baby College, is a series of workshops that helps new/expecting parents build a toolkit of parenting methods that are effective in developing the language skills and cognitive abilities of their children.

Similarly, Canada developed an all-day pre-kindergarten, Harlem Gems, so parents who work all day have child-care (and free education) for their kids. However, pre-kindergarten doesn’t start until age 4, so there was still a year in which children in Harlem were not being served by HCZ. Canada gathered feedback from the community (and particularly from parents) that showed interest in programming for children ages. In addition, however, Canada saw research that showed that children still had a lot of potential to gain cognitive skills between the ages of 3 and 4, and that this particular year is another critical time in which the achievement gap can widen between middle-class students and their low-income counterparts. As a result, Canada developed the Three Year Old Journey, a program targeted at filling (yet another) gap in services that his community gets.

Canada mostly finds the needs of his community by doing community outreach (HCZ has a large community outreach corps) and combining that need-finding with academic research on the conditions (poverty) that affect his community. He combines those to create programs like Baby College and Harlem Gems, in addition to the numerous other programs that HCZ offers. It’s a fantastic program and the first that provides a comprehensive web of support to children and their families. The results have been incredible and, so far, children in HCZ perform several orders of magnitude better in school than children in similar circumstances but not enrolled in any HCZ program.