Geoffrey Canada was born on January 13, 1952, in New York City. His mother instilled an appreciation for education. After graduating Harvard, he returned to Harlem in 1983 to help children in his old neighborhood. He became president of an educational center in 1990 and renamed it the Harlem Children’s Zone. In 2009, President Obama announced plans to expand the center to 20 cities.Born in New York and raised in the South Bronx, Canada is no stranger to poverty and it’s damaging effects on the lives it consumes. With a first-hand hatred of poverty, Canada became a powerful activist and an empathetic role model. It was his grandmother who taught him of dignity even in poverty, and how to “have a deep and spiritual love of life” that was not tied to material things.
After earning his Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Canada went on to become the director of the Robert White School, an institutions for adolescents who were labeled “emotionally disturbed.” Next he took the position of director of the truancy-prevention program at the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, in New York City. Though the budget was increased during his tenure from $2.5 million to $15 million, Canada knew this was not enough for the some 7,000 children the organization served.
In 1997, with the help of an aggressive, business-like strategy, Canada launched the Harlem Children’s Zone, a constantly growing, much more expensive program aimed at revolutionizing the community from the inside out. It employs more than 650 people who work through 20 different programs. The program’s original parameter was 24 blocks, but was expanded to encompass a 60 block zone in 2004.
The New York Times Magazine said the Zone Project “combines educational, social and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood….The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can’t slip through.”
The work of Mr. Canada and HCZ has become a national model and has been the subject of many profiles in the media. Their work has been featured on “60 Minutes,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” “CBS This Morning,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” National Public Radio’s “On Point,” as well in articles in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today and Newsday.