On the strive together podcast Jeffrey Canada and Jennifer Blatz discuss that the reason so many siloed projects fail to help children. Each of the projects by themselves are insufficient to improve the lives of the people he’s helping. All these initiatives are the keystones to each others’ archways of success.
The donors funding these initiatives say that there’s just not enough money to do all of the projects simultaneously. In follow-up, he asks them “well, for you middle class parents telling us that there’s not enough money to invest in all of these children; which aspects of your child’s upbringing were unnecessary? Which aspects of your children’s education, extracurricular activities, tutoring, environmental safety, and mentoring were unnecessary or too expensive to provide?”
Amongst many of the nuggets of wisdom that Geoffrey Canada has bestowed upon us, one of my favorites was him quoting a story about children being pulled out of the river one by one and finally one adult being admonished for running upstream his response being you keep saving the children I’m going to run upstream and find out who’s throwing them in the river in the first place. To me that begs the meta question of how many people do you send upstream to find the person who’s throwing the kids in the stream and then the person or system that set up that first person to throw kids in the stream; etc, ad nauseum.
We have engineered a society that preoccupies itself with pulling children out of the water, but not one that’s good at running upstream to stop them from getting thrown in.
The reason why I find the project of the 24/7/365 school so intriguing and so necessary is very much in that same vein. We as a society will pay 100s of thousands of dollars for chemotherapy and ICU treatment for people to buy a few months of life at the end yet we barely cover children’s preventative and mental health care. Services that will pay off several times over decades down the road. We are already asking too much of our teachers without providing them with adequate resources. We are already asking and demanding and expecting too much of our students without providing them with the right environments. What Geoffrey Canada’s research and actions have shown is that we need programs to be wrap-around, comprehensive, umbrella environments that can create the conditions for which children can learn, thrive, grow, develop, and end the cycle of poverty. We need an institution that from its foundation is directed at the holistic universal care of our children.
We need robust social services as well as family and parenting resources similar to Jeffrey Canada’s baby college. We’ve done the silo project model and yet here we are with the wealth Gap increasing every year. Now is the time to restructure our social services under a more comprehensive and hub based model.
https://hcz.org/
https://hcz.org/our-programs/the-baby-college/
https://www.strivetogether.org/insights/together-for-change-podcast-the-story-of-place-harlem-childrens-zone/