An apocryphal eavesdropping at Collis: "Our Commencement speaker is Geoffrey Canada? Some education reformer guy? Didn't we have a do-gooder last year? Why can't we have someone like Conan again?"
Assuming that I have successfully captured the essence of the reaction of some Dartmouth students, I would like to introduce you to the Geoffrey Canada that I know the one who transformed my life and just may soon transform yours.
When I first met Geoff, I realized that one never actually "meets" Geoffrey Canada. Geoff is such a whirlwind of passion and ideas that you quite simply feel his emotional intensity. The intensity is unidirectional, aimed squarely at the evils of social injustice. How powerful is this irresistible force? Powerful enough to have me trade in my quarterly first-class tickets to Paris as the president of a global advertising agency for my daily Metrocard to the South Bronx where I now teach and counsel high schoolers.
At his graduation from Bowdoin College, Geoff didn't have Wall Street on his mind. He wasn't even thinking about Main Street. Rather, Geoff's focus was on the mean streets of America's inner cities, like those of the South Bronx where he grew up. He was thinking of children who had no future, and he elected to dedicate his life to providing a future for these children.
The Harlem of the 1980s that greeted Geoff was not today's Harlem of gentrification, unending tour bus traffic and impossibly chic restaurants. This was a Harlem dominated by gangs and the crack epidemic, a Harlem where three out of four families lived below the poverty line, where one child in three suffered from asthma and high school graduation rates were below 40 percent. This was the Harlem without hope, the Harlem that compelled Geoffrey Canada to write his first book, "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A History of Violence in America."
In many ways, Geoff's most valuable asset was not his education, which included a master's in education from Harvard University, but his sixth-degree black belt in tae kwon do. Respect was the lingua franca of those Harlem streets. He was hired at a program that provided after school activities for a few dozen children.
Times have changed and so have the prospects for the children of central Harlem. Today, his once tiny agency, the Harlem Children's Zone, has grown to serve more than 11,000 children. In its inaugural year, HCZ's charter school graduated 100 percent of its class, a performance that Anderson Cooper termed "stunning" on "60 Minutes." Further, consider that 99 percent of the children in HCZ's pre-school program were judged "school ready," indicating that the vicious cycle of poverty will likely be broken in some of our nation's poorest zip codes.
What caught the eye of some of the world's top hedge fund managers who joined HCZ's board was the audacity of Geoffrey's vision: to create a pipeline for poor children from cradle to grave, providing a complete set of wrap-around services, including prenatal care, education, after school programming, medical and dental, nutrition and wellness, athletics, housing, employment, technology and social services. What won the ongoing support of these bottom-line-focused money managers are his results. HCZ is changing the odds for an entire community. Money follows success. Goldman Sachs and Google are the major funders of the Promise Academy Charter School, a new $100 million, K-12 institution and the first built at the center of a New York City public housing project.
Geoff raised almost half a billion dollars to launch and sustain this vision. The one-time dream became a reality and today, HCZ runs on an operating budget of $120 million per year, employing 2,000 professionals. The Harlem Children's Zone endowment of $300 million is a testament to the belief in this modern day Robin Hood. In fact, Geoff is better than Robin Hood; the rich give to him, so he may give to the poor. That belief extends to President Barack Obama, who committed funds to create 20 similar "promise neighborhoods" in devastated areas around the country. One can easily understand why Michelle Obama refers to Geoff as "my personal hero," or why Mayor Michael Bloomberg characterized Geoff as "the greatest living New Yorker."
Calling Geoffrey Canada an education reformer is like calling Michael Phelps a swimmer a bit of an understatement. He can best be characterized as a "life reformer." This is a man who told the Education Department: "I want to teach the children everyone else has already given up on." A man who embodies former College President John Sloan Dickey's call to action, "Make the world's problems your problems." So, if you never heard of Geoff Canada, that is not his problem, but it may be yours. Perhaps when you meet him, you will be transformed too. The opportunity is yours.
