Harlem Children's Zone, Inc.

Harlem Children's Zone, Inc. has experienced incredible growth - from the number of children we serve to the breadth of our services. But one thing has stayed the same: the agency's "whatever it takes" attitude when it comes to helping children to succeed. The organization began 1970 as Rheedlen, working with young children and their families as the city's first truancy-prevention program. In 1991, the agency was among the first in the city to open a Beacon Center. Our Countee Cullen Community Center turned a public school that used to shut its door at the end of the school day into a community center offering a range of services and activities on nights, weekends and summers. In the 1990s, to help keep local schools safe, the Harlem Peacemakers program began placing AmeriCorps participants in classrooms. These young people were a welcome presence assisting teachers during the school day and then running programs after school. In the late 1990s, HCZ ran a pilot project that brought a range of support services to a single block. The idea was to address all the problems that poor families were facing: from crumbling apartments to failing schools, from violent crime to chronic health problems. It created a 10-year business plan, then to ensure its best-practice programs were operating as planned, HCZ was in the vanguard of nonprofits that began carefully evaluating and tracking the results of their work. In 1997, the agency began a network of programs for a 24-block area: the Harlem Children's Zone Project. In 2007, the Zone Project grew to almost 100 blocks and served 7,400 children and over 4,100 adults. Under the visionary leadership of its President and CEO, Geoffrey Canada, HCZ continues to offer innovative, efficiently run programs that are aimed at doing nothing less than breaking the cycle of generational poverty for the thousands of children and families it serves. All HCZ programs are offered free to the children and families of Harlem, which is made possible by donations from people like yourself. Source: www.hcz.org