5 needs that any COVID19 response should meet Kwame OwusuKesse
Good evening.
It is such a blessing to work
at the Harlem Children’s Zone,
an African-American-led organization
that has pioneered the field
of comprehensive place-based services,
from cradle to career.
And that word, “comprehensive,”
is so key to what we do.
You know, most interventions
focus on one piece
of a complicated, giant puzzle.
But that’s not enough to solve the puzzle.
You don’t solve education
without understanding the home context
or the home environment
of our young scholar.
Or the broader context of health,
nutrition or criminal justice.
The unit of change for us
is not the individual child,
it’s the entire neighborhood.
You have to do multiple things
at the same time.
And we have 20 years of data
to prove that this works.
We’ve had 7,000 graduates
of our baby college,
we’ve eliminated the Black-white
achievement gap in our schools.
We’ve reduced obesity rates
in our health programs
and have close to 1,000 students
enrolled in college.
We weave together
a net of services so tightly,
so that no one will fall
through the cracks.
And we’ve inspired global practitioners.
We’ve had over 500-plus
communities across the US
and 70-plus countries
come and visit us to learn our model.
You see, the problems of the globe,
and the problems of the world
are not neatly siloed into buckets.
So therefore the solutions
must be comprehensive,
they must be holistic.
And now we’re in the midst
of a global pandemic.
COVID-19 has revealed to us
what we always knew to be true.
The poorest among us pay the highest price
with their lives and their livelihood.
And that’s playing out every day
in the African American community,
where we’re 3.6 times
more likely to die of COVID
than our white counterparts.
We’re seeing those health disparities
on the ground in New York City,
our nation’s epicenter.
And to compound the impact
of the health disparities,
there’s significant economic devastation,
where one in four
of our families in Harlem
report food insecurity,
and 57 percent report a loss of income
or a loss of their job.
But to better understand the work
of the Harlem Children’s Zone,
I want to share a story with you,
about a second-grade scholar named Sean.
Sean is a beautiful Black boy
whose smile would light up
any room that he’s in.
And when quarantine began in March,
we noticed that Sean
wasn’t attending virtual school.
And after some investigation,
we’ve come to learn that Sean’s mom
was hospitalized due to COVID.
So he was at home
with grandma and his baby sibling,
who was his only viable support system,
since Sean’s father is incarcerated.
Grandma was struggling.
There wasn’t much food in the household,
limited diapers,
and Sean didn’t even have a computer.
When mom was released from the hospital,
their challenges deepened,
because they could no longer
stay with grandma,
due to her preexisting health conditions.
So Sean, his baby sibling and his mom
had to go to a shelter.
Sean’s story is not atypical
at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
We know Sean and millions like him
all across the country
deserve to have everything
that this world has to offer,
without inequality
robbing them of that opportunity.
All the result of racism
and historical and systemic
underinvestment
are now compounded by COVID-19.
Our comprehensive model
uniquely positions the Harlem
Children’s Zone in the fight of COVID.
The success that we have
on the ground in Harlem
makes it imperative,
and it is our responsibility
to share what we know works
with the country.
We have developed a comprehensive
COVID-19 relief and recovery response
for our community,
that was surfaced from our community,
focused on five primary areas of need,
and already servicing
families like Sean’s.
They are the following.
One, emergency relief funds.
We know that our families need cash
in their hands right now.
Two, protecting our most vulnerable.
We know our families need access
to essential goods and information.
So that is food, that’s masks,
that’s a curated resource list
and public health campaigns.
Three, bridging the digital divide.
We believe that internet
is a fundamental right.
So we need to ensure
our families have connectivity,
and also all school-age
children in a household
have the proper learning devices.
Four, zero learning loss.
We know that there’s a generation
of students at risk
of losing an entire year
of their education.
We need to make sure that we are providing
high-quality virtual programing,
in addition to having safe
reentry planned for school reentry.
And five, mitigating
the mental health crisis.
There’s a generation at risk
of having PTSD,
due to the massive amounts
of toxic stress.
We need to ensure that our families
have access to telehealth
and other virtual supports.
We have six amazing partners
across six cities in the United States
that are adopting our model
for their own context in their community.
They are Oakland, Minneapolis,
Chicago, Detroit, Newark and Atlanta.
In addition to those partners,
we have three national partners,
who will be sharing our model
and sharing our strategies
through their network,
in addition to amplifying our impact
by policy advocacy.
We will have impact on three levels.
Individual impact on the ground in Harlem,
across a number of outcomes in education,
in health, in economics,
reaching 30,000 people.
There’s community-level impact
across six cities,
again through our amazing partners,
that will reach an additional
70,000 people.
And then national impact,
not only through policy advocacy,
but through capacity building at scale.
Our answer to COVID-19,
the despair and inequities
plaguing our communities,
is targeting neighborhoods
with comprehensive services.
We have certainly not lost hope.
And we invite you to join us
on the front lines of this war.
Thank you.