Geoffrey Canada, the acclaimed president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, will be in Baltimore Thursday, October 28, to discuss his ongoing work to transform the lives of thousands of Harlem children and its application to Baltimore City.
Mr. Canada launched the Harlem Children’s Zone Project several years ago to provide wide-ranging services for at-risk children in a large section of Central Harlem. The organization now has 650 people working in more than 20 programs and serves about 3,000 children who live in the 60-block zone.
“Geoffrey Canada’s work in Harlem can help us understand how to break out of the prevailing culture of violence in Baltimore and focus, instead, on providing our youth educational, after-school and training opportunities,” said Diana Morris, director of OSI-Baltimore.
Mr. Canada, who grew up in the South Bronx, has dedicated his life to helping children who grew up in conditions similar to those faced by his family secure both educational and economic opportunities.
In a June 20, 2004 profile, the New York Times summarized Mr. Canada’s work this way:
“He has become a very different kind of do-gooder, one with a mission both radically ambitious and startlingly simple. He wants to prove that poor children, and especially poor black children, can succeed—that is, achieve good reading scores, good grades and good graduation rates—and not just the smartest or the most motivated or the ones with the most attentive parents, but all of them, in big numbers.”
Mr. Canada was the featured speaker at an awards luncheon sponsored by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. At the luncheon, OSI announced the recipients of its 2004 Baltimore Community Fellowships grants, which support the work of ten individuals to address pervasive problems in Baltimore’s underserved communities.