With the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone, the federal government awarded 21 planning grants of $500,000 across the country. The grants were part of the government’s Promise Neighborhood initiative. The purpose of the grant was to bring together the resources of all the agencies and organizations that provide services for children and families in order to make services more efficient and to close procedural gaps which delay services to children and families. The grant is supposed to be the conduit for collaboration, coordination, better communication and identifying areas of need to develop better “wraparound services[i]”
Promise Neighborhoods seek to replicate the “cradle-through-college-career” approach that was first developed by the Harlem Children’s Zone. The approach was to aggressively address and dismantle the barriers in a child’s life that affected learning. By removing or greatly diminishing barriers, it allowed families to focus on their child’s education. The Promise Neighborhood belief is
“when families spend so much time trying to make ends meet,
they rarely focus on improving their situation[ii].”
By supporting families from the time of conception, barriers such as the access to health care are removed and the child is less likely to suffer from lack of prenatal care. As the child grows, having the supports in place to address potential educational and social service needs could lessen the impact on learning when the need occurs.
The Promise Neighborhood initiative is attempting to implement the idea that it “takes a whole village to raise a child.” While the end product is to help children graduate from high school, enroll and graduate from a post-secondary education program and become adults that contribute to society, the family unit is stabilized and strengthened. By focusing on children, the whole family is helped.
We know the needs of families in economically distressed neighborhoods. If the Promise Neighborhood grants can replicate what the Harlem Children’s Zone has done to stabilize and strengthen families, children across the country will be able to focus on being children and their education. If a family is struggling with stable employment, the resources of the Promise Neighborhood would connect the parent(s) with an agency that assists adults with training and finding stable employment. If a family is struggling with childcare for younger non-school age siblings, Promise Neighborhood resources would assists the family with finding affordable childcare.
Whatever the need of a family are, healthcare, housing, GED, etc, Promise Neighborhood resources will be at a family’s disposal to support and remove barriers that affect a child’s learning. Hopefully this will be the initiative that transforms income distressed neighborhoods and stabilizes families.
No comments:
Post a Comment