Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Urban Poverty: Harlem Children's Zone's 'Cradle to Career' Approach for Comprehensive Social Change
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Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Urban Poverty
Harlem Children Zone's 'Cradle to Career' Approach for Comprehensive Social Change
Kwame Owusu-Kesse
CEO, Harlem Children's Zone
FEBRUARY 2021
“How do I replicate Harlem Children's Zone in my city?”
This is probably the question we get more often than any other from organizations and service providers, particularly outside of New York City. The success of Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) in changing lives over the last two decades has created a hunger in other places to bring about HCZ-level transformation. We are extremely humbled by the replication question and are committed to help strengthen the broader field of practice.
It should be noted that when we discuss replication, it is a focus on the core elements of our model and not on creating HCZ franchisees or exact replicas of our operations in Harlem; having the flexibility to account for local context is critically important.
Based on the HCZ philosophy, these are the five elements that need to be present for an organization to effectively reproduce our model:
Building and rebuilding community. There needs to be a comprehensive knowledge of the community being served and the people living in that community, what we call “place-based” work. The groundbreaking revelations of researchers like Raj Chetty have shown us the devastating impact that the neighborhoods where we live have on our life chances.
Working at scale. You need to make sure you are having a meaningful impact by reaching a tipping point, a saturation. When HCZ was created, there wasn’t any real empirical reason why the geographic boundaries were drawn the way they were except that the idea was to reach a critical mass of 10,000 young people. That number represented about 70 to 80 percent of the young people in our geographic area. If you can lay your hands on a majority of the young people, you start to create a cause culture. Your presence begins to have a major influence on the direction of peer groups.
“Wait a minute—Kwame got into college? Well, I know I can get into college too!” Kids do what other kids do. If you’re on the corner selling drugs, kids are going to do that. If you’re on the court playing ball, they’re going to do that. If you're going to college, they're going to do that. It’s about creating a level of momentum to affect the peer group thrust. Because of the society we live in, this can be one of the most difficult aspects to sustain. You have to build up the financial stability and infrastructure to be able to scale up without straining the threads of the whole enterprise.
An integrated set of best practice programs from cradle to career. This part of the strategy is critical, yet one of the hardest for organizations to achieve. It means not just having a high-quality early childhood program over here, nothing for elementary students, and then maybe a middle school program over there. No, it has to be integrated across the longer developmental stages of our young people: from birth through college to career. We have to create a net of services that is so tight, no one is falling through the holes.
Use of data. This is crucial; it’s not enough to love these kids and be mission-aligned. You have to be able to deliver with excellence. And the way you know you’re meeting the mark is with clear goals and measurable outcomes in areas like education, health, and wellness.
A culture of accountability. You must acknowledge that this work is hard. In order to execute, you not only must have talent, but you must hold folks accountable to a level of excellence that the community deserves. At HCZ, we have formal ways of doing this, like year-end and mid-year evaluations. But we also have what we call “walk-around management,” which can mean informally dropping in on folks to see how they’re holding up. This is not a place where you’re sitting behind your desk. We have to hold our staff accountable to do what they say they’re going to do—and they must hold us accountable as leadership to set them up for success.
These five elements serve as the foundation to effective place-based interventions. While the work is complex and comprehensive, it is not impossible. What has driven our success is that unrelenting spirit of possibility within the communities we serve. This is nation-building work, and I am hopeful that as a field, we will collectively achieve our north star of millions of young people on the pathway to social and economic mobility and racial equity—ultimately breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
Photo: Sergio Alexis Perez mural in Harlem, New York, by Shaun Dawson