Audioconferences
Achieving Results with Promise Neighborhoods: Ensuring Children's Healthy Development, Well-Being, and Academic Success
GIH Maternal and Child Health Audioconference Series, cosponsored with Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families (GCYF)
Who:
Kate Shoemaker, Director, Policy and Special Projects, Harlem Children's Zone
What:
Legislation appropriating federal funding to the Promise Neighborhoods initiative represents a public-private undertaking aimed at helping local communities achieve dramatic improvements in the outcomes and opportunities available for children, youth, and families in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty. This initiative is patterned from the approach and achievements of the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) model, which focuses intensively on supporting children's educational, health, and social development from birth through college graduation within a 97 block area. A continuum of services is provided to develop and improve the children's family and neighborhood environments through a seamless series of free and coordinated best-practice programs for children and adults.
Promise Neighborhoods will focus on a core set of essential results that heighten the importance of developing and maintaining linkages with other federal, state, and local initiatives and diverse funding sources.
13 million children live in poverty. For the United States to succeed as a nation, we must transform children’s lives. Poverty is tied to vocabulary development. Divide in vocabulary is clearly seen at age 2 and nearly doubles by age 3. As numerous studies have shown, early years are critical for later learning capability, so this early disparity has the potential for negative impact.
Principles of the Harlem Children’s Zone model
1. Need to serve entire community comprehensively, at large enough scale to benefit entire community.
-Connected approach: need to have enough kids in the neighborhood impacted
(65% is the minimum target).
-Street culture needs to be pushed back. Before you can change the culture, you
need to change “the norm” for the majority of kids.
2. Pipeline of Services: implement a best practice program at every development stage (0
– 24 years of age).
-Case management program tries to ensure that kids aren’t just getting into college,
but graduating as well.
-Focus on family services, from help with tax filing to financial counseling that
encourages savings to improving access to low cost health centers.
-Asthma and obesity are two big issues affecting children in program area. HCZ has
specific programs to address these two problems. Healthy Living charter school
program: Healthy foods are prepared onsite – low sugar, no vending machines, no
junk food, salad bar. “When there’s nothing else to eat, an apple starts looking really
good.”
-Charter School: built in response to frustration with local public schools that were all
failing. Slots are filled by lottery (as required by New York state law whenever the
number of applicants exceeds number of slots available). Extended school year, with
two weeks off in August. Merit pay and bonuses to incentivize staff. Leaders have
the power to hire and fire as they see fit.
3. Community building.
-Engage stakeholders and residents.
-Use tenant and block associations as means of developing skills of neighborhood
residents to effectuate change.
-Beautifying the neighborhood to develop pride in the community, i.e. creating a
garden, renovating a playground, painting a mural.
4. Evaluation.
-Integral to work.
-Team of internal evaluators, which also meets with external team to crunch data and
assess success of program in a complementary way.
-Database that staff enter data into from HCZ sites. Collect and analyze data for use
by policymakers and to apply for funding.
5. Share knowledge with other communities. Partnered with PolicyLink to implement
HCZ model in what would be known as “Promise Neighborhoods.”
Recommendations for Promise Neighborhood Program
1. Stay nonprofit and non-government run.
2. Accountable leadership.
3. Funding from diverse sources (private/public partnership). Private dollars allow greater
innovation and work well as a supplement to public funding, while public grants allow
a program to get underway.
4. Well-run technical assistance portion to answer questions from stakeholders and
potential funders.
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Harlem Children's Zone: Whatever It Takes (1289K)
[download] |
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From Cradle through College (250K)
[download] |
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Focusing on Results (375K)
[download] |
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Harlem Children's Zone and Policylink presentation (1971K)
[download] |
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Results and Indicators for Children (679K)
[download] |
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Baby College (Paul Tough’s New York Times article) (204K)
[download] |