Geoffrey Canada
Geoffrey Canada
Geoffrey Canadais an American educator, social activist and author. Since 1990, Canada has been president of the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, New York, an organization that states its goal is to increase high school and college graduation rates among students in Harlem. Canada serves as the chairman of Children's Defense Fund's board of directors. He was a member of the board of directors of The After-School Corporation, a nonprofit organization that aims to expand educational opportunities for all students...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth13 January 1952
CityBronx, NY
CountryUnited States of America
It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.
I believe that for lots of churches and religious institutions, their main focus on the development of faith among parishioners needs to spread to the community.
When you see a great teacher, you are seeing a work of art,
Let's stop teaching to the middle and start teaching to the student.
Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.
Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.
One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist. I was a comic book reader. I read comic books and I just loved them because even in the depths of the ghetto, you just thought, 'he’s coming. I just don’t know when because he always shows up and saves all the good people.’ I was maybe in the fourth grade, fifth grade; I was like ‘Mom you think Superman’s coming?’ and she said ‘Superman is not real.’ She thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.
The rates of soda consumption in our poorest communities cannot be explained by individual consumer preferences alone, but rather are linked to broader issues of access and affordability of healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, and to the marketing efforts of soda companies themselves.
When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching. It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters,
Monsters work seven days a week and don't take vacations.
There is an educational cliff we are walking over right this very second.
Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.
You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'
The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.