Harlem Children’s Zone Leaders: It’ll Take a Decade to Make Up for 2020 | Amanpour and Company

the harlem children's zone is a renowned non-profit that deploys all tools necessary to help kids in poverty jeffrey canada who's known for his pioneering work with children is president and kwame owusu is ceo together they're providing low-income families with critical social and academic services so that kids can keep learning during this pandemic and now their community based model is being scaled up nationwide and here they are explaining this work to our hari sreenivasan christian thanks uh kwame osuke and jeffrey canada thanks so much for joining us kwame i want to start with you this is a time where the community around the harlem children's soul zone around the rest of the country really has been dealing with these dual pandemics or these dual crises both about the virus but also about racial justice and racial injustice that's been happening on the streets first just give us a snapshot of the kids you serve who who is the average child that's coming through these schools who's the average person that's availing themselves of the services that the zone has created all right well the harlem children's zone is situated in central harlem and we are we're targeting what we call the deep end of the pool the the students that are most need of our services uh for example we we work very closely in our saint nicholas housing development uh average family of four makes 18 100 a year um there's 4 000 residents in saint nicholas housing development over half do not have adults who are working um so we're working with a community where there are quite dire circumstances but a community that we believe in and we know that our young people are full of promise and potential so we're we're really excited to be able to offer comprehensive services uh to the individuals we serve in central harlem i think too often a common misperception of the work of the harlem children's zone is that we're just a charter school but we we offer a whole host of programs from birth through college that focus on education youth development health and wellness and community building kwame give you an idea of what you've been able to do that is outside what we would traditionally consider a school's responsibility especially in the context of a pandemic what kinds of services what kinds of needs were you starting to fill in many ways the harlem children's zone views ourselves as first responders and as jeff and i continue to talk about what the devastating impacts of the pandemic would have in harlem we had to spring into action so immediately in march we surveyed our families and i think one of the benefits of having proximity to our community is we can have real time data to inform the decisions that we that we've been able to make so we sent out a survey where we had over 3 300 families respond we also were tracking the clicks on our website for resource page on our resource page and we were able to triangulate and develop a five-pronged approach to our coveted response uh there were multi elements to that so one the need for emergency relief funds uh two the idea of protecting our most vulnerable so providing mass and launching a public health campaign the third was bridging the digital divide and providing laptops to our community the fourth was preventing learning loss so not only being able to have high quality virtual engagement but also preparing for safe re-entry and we have converted some of our facilities to rapid testing facility and the fifth and final component was mitigating the mental health crisis understanding that there's massive amounts of toxic stress so making sure that our families had access to proper virtual interventions today we've been able to provide and distribute over 35 000 masks about 1400 laptops 2200 thermometers we've conducted probably 2 500 pcr and antigen tests not to mention being able to provide high quality live instruction for our students in our schools from 8 a.m to 4 p.m every day so there's no replacement for in-school learning but being able to have teachers on live and be able to work directly with our students i think has been a very unique aspect of our offerings at the organization particularly as i'm in conversation with high high performing practitioners across the country jeffrey kennedy you ran this school for years you're acutely aware of the existing struggles that are there the disparate health impacts the structural effects of poverty and in many ways these are even though they might be incredibly low paying jobs these are some of the most essential of essential workers so i i think we have totally underestimated the importance of people who educate our children teach them every day support them after school uh i think that uh we're facing a crisis now uh in education uh that's on top of another crisis we already had a crisis of underpaying teachers of teachers not staying in the field because they didn't have enough money to support themselves and their families now on top of that we have a crisis with children our kids have been out of school now for close to six seven months and for poor children this is devastating uh this is a time where kwame and i are saying to our country if we value equity if we care about black and brown lives we're going to have to make a massive investment in the communities that are being disproportionately hit by coving because these are the same communities that we're learning have suffered for the last 50 years by structural racism by a disinvestment in those communities you layer on top of that what's happening around health and jobs and food and housing and we see a crisis that we feel like the country has not responded to what have you learned during this period about what is required especially to reach the kids that are hardest to reach that might be in the most difficult situations at home whether they have the bandwidth that is in broadband or is in time as in space as a support network in their parents what have you learned during this pandemic that can help other schools learn on how to reach these kids what we were transparent with our community about is that we're not going to be able to prevent covet from showing up on our doorstep but what is within our responsibility is making sure that we're mitigating against any potential for massive spread so having uh well-tailored systems and processes in place in terms of if someone is symptomatic do you have an isolation room the we had the ability of having on-site testing which is really helpful to be able to make timely decisions school design and scheduling and how you're able to schedule to allow folks to be in pods so in the event that if there was an instance of of cover that showed up it only impacts the small number of folks so having the systems and processes in place is really important and just understanding um programming like who is your target audience and how can you reimagine program to be able to offer both having a virtual option in the event to mitigate against disruptions right because inevitably there's a scare that will happen someone may be covet impact but how do you make sure that you have a programmatic design that can um least impact a student due to disruptions and i think that's been informing our approach uh during this time and have been some of the major lessons that we've learned in this time period jeffrey you came out of retirement to help scale some of the ideas that you're talking about to think about education holistically beyond just the walls of the physical classroom and you're now working with organizations in six different cities um why was this important well you know first of all i i smiled because i was happy in retirement uh and folks told me i would hate it but i didn't hate it at all uh and when kwame came to me uh and said that his vision as the new ceo of the harlem children's zone uh was to actually figure out a way we could help uh save another million children by getting them on the road to uh social and economic uh mobility in this country i just found that too tantalizing uh to resist uh and you know what we've discovered there are community groups around this country that are already doing high quality work and this is what i don't think people understand people think we're out trying to uh simply recreate the harlem children's oh no there are a set of principles about working comprehensively with children by providing support for their health their mental health their physical health and spiritual health and high quality education that we think works for children no matter where they are they work for middle class children but poor children in particular need these supports and so we said let's figure out how we can help help turbocharge these efforts around the country let's find the best places that are doing high quality work and let's try and bring the resources and supports to help them scale their efforts so that we can impact as many children as humanly possible over the course of the next 10 years kwame you grew up in challenging circumstances um what was the key to try and getting you from where you started to getting through harvard and running this institution now well i would say despite the challenges that i i grew up in i think those challenges of what defined me and i think some of the key aspects of what led to the the success that i've been able to achieve um exists in our model here in harlem so that is the idea of at the core i was given a fantastic opportunity uh to to have a fantastic education at a local elementary school called venturini academy because the nuns fell in love with my mom who played bingo at that school they gave me a scholarship that absolutely changed my life trajectory so in addition to having high quality education there were quality wrap around services in terms of athletics and the arts and enrichment programs and exposures that i had but i would say the one of the most impactful things that i think turbocharged my trajectory was having adults that believed in my potential at the time in the 90s there was no thought of having a black president and they would always say to me you you're going to be the first black president of the united states i had no political aspirations but the fact that they they believed that put a battery in my back that said hey if i can focus on something and set my mind to to achieving a goal anything is possible and i have a community of support i have social capital to be able to provide me the resources the expertise the know-how the support the love the guidance the knowledge to be able to achieve success and better my family situation so i think though those were some of the critical elements in my personal story that led to a pathway ultimately to graduate from harvard college begin a career on wall street at morgan stanley and ultimately end up in my dream dream job at the harlem children's zone so jeffrey you've watched kids like kwame go through the harlem children's own schools whether they started as kindergartners and now some of them are in college the idea of college was probably drilled into these kids the importance of it the grandeur of it and here they are comes fall and they're doing it over zoom this this is you know to me one of the continuing tragedies of uh what's been happening in our country um what we found is that they're a group of kids who actually need to get away to college to be successful uh and i was one of those kids there was been no way that i could have stayed in the south bronx and did college work by zoom my life was uh too chaotic there were too many pressures on me i needed to be able to get away and focus and go to a library and and have that whole environment change so i am worried about even our kids who are successful even the ones who are in college right now i worry that they struggle because they're home they're often the strongest members of their family everybody is pulling on them to try and help to get a job to try and help pay some bills and you know we've been preparing these young people to go to college so we're going to do everything humanly possible to help them but i am telling you uh up and down the whole cradle to career pipeline we have a generation of young people who have been traumatized by this experience and it's not going to take six months or seven months to make up for this uh we're going to be working on this problem for the next decade trying to make up for what has happened uh in 2020 and 2021 to poor children in this country kwame one of the more acute needs that your school fills is school lunches or breakfast just plain old food how have you gotten around that considering how important that nutrition is for everything else and some of these families might be really reliant on that school lunch it's a great question i think typically in a year we have a chef that produces over a million meals a year for for our community and the the role that the school plays for feeding our young people making sure that they have a healthy and warm meal is so critical and one of the things that we've been able to do for one is just being able to provide a number of support for our community given the food insecurity so today we've handed out 4 000 packages of two-week supplies of non-perishable items and monthly we have harvests where today we've distributed over 30 000 pounds of fresh produce most specifically to our students in our schools we continue to be able to provide a delivery service that is able to provide meals every single day to our young people to ensure that food insecurity is not one of the things that's going to impede their ability to learn what is the role of government here and where has it done well and where has it fallen short yes so so here's where government really did well uh the first cares act uh the ability to increase the unemployment payments to folks uh knowing that huge numbers of americans were out of work for no reason of their own i cannot tell you how many people who i know that lifeline literally saved them during this period of time uh that we've had to shut down the country to try and deal with uh this pandemic um but that also is where we're failing uh our citizens right now uh the fact that our congress could not get together with the president uh and pass a new uh series of supports for uh families and the unemployed in this country is an absolute disaster uh and i think it's criminal and i'm not uh sort of exaggerating people are going to die because they don't have the basic necessities they cannot buy medicine they cannot buy food there is no way for them to pay their rent and they feel like they've been abandoned by the government which has essentially said we're going on vacation uh we're not going to deal with this problem in america right now uh this is in the midst of a health pandemic i think uh this is a shame and i mean i'm ashamed of our country for failing to aid its citizens in their time of need uh this is that when you begin to look at all of the people dying in this country and they can uh compare it to we're losing more people in a day than we lost in pearl harbor and then the government says we're not going to help i think that absolute disgrace and we need to hold our government officials accountable for their failure to act call me yeah i would agree with that i think we're at a unique moment in our country right now where the collective consciousness consciousness is primed for action and if we're talking about having a meaningful impact at scale there must be a response from the government to be able to bring and marshal the resources that are necessary in order to fight on the front lines of this war so whether it is ppe support other financial support particularly in the most devastated communities so that they can be a multi-faceted uh response to a multi-dimensional threat and covet in the social social justice environment and it's imperative for the government to be able to step up to the leadership mantle because this can't just be done on the backs of nonprofits or just on the backs of philanthropic dollars or even just corporate dollars there needs to be a comprehensive response um in order to be able to achieve true scale and that leadership has to uh come from the government kwame iwo sukeshi and jeff canada thanks so much for joining us thank you for having us boy you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

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Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, Harlem Children's Zone, Geoffrey Canada, Kwame Owusu-Kesse, children, education, COVID-19, community, Hari Sreenivasan

Id: A-eiGwDRxcY

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020