Person of the Week: Geoffrey Canada Lifts Up Harlem's Students One Block At A Time
Founder of Harlem Children's Zone featured in movie, 'Waiting For Superman.'
— -- Geoffrey Canada has 650 kids in college right now. He's helped raise a generation of children in New York's Harlem.
Canada founded the Harlem Children's Zone in the nineties, leading a bold social experiment using education to break the cycle of poverty for poor children in the United States. He literally turned around Central Harlem, block by block, creating safe zones through schools and community centers for kids to learn and play.
"When I sit down and see my young people working hard and studying for a test, it fills my heart with joy," Canada said. "This is why we created the zone, to see our kids with a real fighting opportunity."
The Zone provides free and comprehensive educational, social and medical services for all 10,000 kids who live in the 96 blocks of central Harlem.
"What we wanted to see in Harlem was our community to look like middle class communities, where kids had healthcare, where kids got their teeth fixed from the dentist, where kids were not obese and they were eating nutritional meals, where young people didn't have to worry about gangs and being shot and being killed," Canada said.
His innovations in Harlem made him a focal point in the newly released documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman.'" The film explores the flaws in the nation's education system and the solutions some reformers, like Canada, are successfully using to help students.
It's Canada's personal story that gave the film its title.
"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist," Canada says in the film. "She thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming with enough power to save us."
Canada grew up like the kids he now helps, in a tough urban neighborhood. The 58-year-old educator and his three brothers were raised by a single mother in the South Bronx.
Canada said that when he reached high school, he reached a turning point.
"I was looking for a way out, and I figured out early on that my way had to be education, and if there was one door that I could slide through and get out of the South Bronx to success, it was going to be education," he said.
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