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“We are in a state of war in the inner cities,” the educator, author, and public advocate Geoffrey Canada told David Holmstrom for the Christian Science Monitor (June 5, 1995). “I call it American’s secret war against itself, . . . and the war’s chief victims are children.” For nearly three decades Canada, the president and chief executive officer of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), has worked to help urban children escape violence and poverty. Raised in the South Bronx, Canada understands firsthand the effect poor urban areas have on the children who grow up in them. Through HCZ, a nonprofit community-based organization, Canada has instituted innovative new programs and services that address a variety of problems faced by impoverished families and children. Among the resources HCZ offers are community-organizing services, after-school programs, training for new parents, family counseling, and, as of the fall of 2004, a new charter school called the HCZ Promise Academy. By providing smaller class sizes, longer instruction time, and basic health-care services, the academy seeks to create an environment in which poor urban youngsters have the chance to perform well in school and in life. “There may be some in this country who think being poor is a matter of lack of values and determination. But I know it to be something different,” Canada said during his speech to accept the Heinz Award, in January 1995. “You can work hard all of your life, have impeccable values and still be poor.”

The third of four brothers, Geoffrey Canada was born on January 13, 1952 in New York City. The marriage of his father, McAlister Canada, and mother, Mary Canada, ended when Geoffrey was four; afterward, his father did not contribute to the support of his children, and they rarely saw him. Geoffrey and his brothers (Daniel, John, and the youngest, Reuben) were raised by their mother in the South Bronx, a section of New York City that has long symbolized urban decay. In the 1950s white residents of the South Bronx began fleeing the area as low-income blacks and Hispanics moved there in growing numbers. Thus, the Canadas and their neighbors had “little contact with whites and black middle-class families . . . ,” as Canada recalled in an essay for Daedalus (Winter 1999). “We [grew] up poor, segregated from other races, ethnic groups, and economic classes.” During Canada’s boyhood his mother worked at odd jobs; at times she relied on welfare and donations of food from charities. “We were too poor to dress properly,” Canada recalled to Michelle Green for People (April 10, 1995). “I had thin socks, thin pants, no sweaters and no boots. It wasn't until years later that I found out you could remain warm in the winter if you had the right clothes.” When Canada gave his acceptance speech for the Heinz Award, he said that he and his brothers “hated being poor. . . . And though there was much love in our family, being poor strained our loving bonds. We had to blame someone for our condition, and our mother was our only target. And here she was giving all she had for us.” Canada has expressed gratitude toward his mother for imparting to him and his brothers solid values, including the belief that one is responsible for one’s actions. She also emphasized the importance of a good education and encouraged them to read; she herself later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and became a substance-abuse counselor. Another big influence in his life was his first-grade teacher, who introduced him to The Cat and the Hat and other books by the author and illustrator Dr. Seuss. “Poetry saved my life,” Canada said in a speech at Syracuse University, as quoted by Jean Stevens in the college’s student newspaper, the Daily Orange (January 20, 2004, on-line). By the time he was nine years old, he told Felicia R. Lee for the New York Times (January 9, 2000, on-line), he had resolved that some day he would help inner-city youngsters like himself. “It was simply being very aware of how unjust the world was for poor children,” he said.

As a means of ensuring his survival in his tough, crime-ridden neighborhood, the adolescent Canada became a sort of mascot for a teenager named Mike. From Mike, and through careful observation, he learned the “codes of conduct,” or unspoken rules and hierarchies, that prevailed among the youths in his neighborhood; he learned how to fight with his fists most effectively, how to hide feelings of weakness and the importance of doing so, and other ways of being street smart. Mike, he wrote in his memoir Fist Stick Knife Gun (1995), “rescued me when I was a small, helpless boy, confused and scared. . . . [He] was like a knight in shining armor.” Later Canada took to carrying a knife, which made him feel bolder and less vulnerable to attack. One day he accidentally sliced his right index finger to the bone with the knife; knowing that his mother would confiscate the weapon if he came to her for help, he treated the cut himself. Within days he reinjured it while playing basketball, and the finger healed with the last joint at an angle. He has never had surgery to straighten it because, as he wrote in Fist Stick Knife Gun, “the finger keeps the urgency of the work my colleagues and I do with children at the forefront of my mind. The slight deformity is such a small price to have paid for growing up in the South Bronx. . . . I don't want to forget what life was like [there]. . . . Fear and the struggle to survive were ever-present realities. The finger is my reminder of what young people are willing to do for protection.”

When Canada was in his mid-teens, his mother sent him to live with her parents in Freeport, on Long Island, New York. His grandmother, he said in his Heinz Award acceptance speech, “cooled my hot temper and anger over being poor and showed me there was dignity, even in poverty. . . . She taught me how one could have a deep, spiritual love of life that was not tied to material things.” Canada attended the nearby, nearly all-black Wyandanch Memorial High School. He earned good grades, and as a senior he won a scholarship from the Fraternal Order of Masons. In the fall of 1970, he enrolled at Bowdoin College, a small liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, where--since he had never been there before--he was shocked to learn that the student body was all male (it became co-ed the next year) and 95 percent Caucasian. His grave misgivings about how he would fare in such an environment soon faded; indeed, he discovered, as he wrote for Daedalus, “Bowdoin was my kind of place.” One reason, he explained, was “its academic excellence”; another was that “people cared about one another. Students would go out of their way to help you if you needed it. The longer we were at the school, the more we felt responsible for those who followed us. The faculty seemed to feel the same way.” In his senior year he enjoyed many private discussions with his professors about the issues of the day and his personal goals; he also earned high honors in all his classes. “My success was less a testament to my brilliance than a tribute to the hard work of professors and students who believed in me, challenged me, molded me, and finally sent me out into the world to do what I had to do,” he wrote for Daedalus. Canada majored in psychology and sociology and took many courses in education. He graduated from Bowdoin with a B.A. in 1974. The next year he completed a master’s degree in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the summer of 1975, Canada supervised a program for children with emotional problems at Camp Freedom, in Ossipee, New Hampshire. Later that year he joined the staff of the Robert White School, a private day school for what were labeled “emotionally disturbed adolescents.” “Really, the school was the last stop before jail or a locked psychiatric hospital for teenagers from Boston slums,” Canada wrote in Fist Stick Knife Gun. Although the White School’s students were Caucasian, “by and large [they were] just like the kids I had grown up with in the Bronx. They were poor, angry, estranged from society . . . [and] preoccupied with violence.” Canada soon became recognized for his skill in handling the most angry and violent of the students. In 1976 he was named associate director of the school; he became its director the next year.

In 1983 Canada left the Robert White School to assume the post of educational director and director of the truancy-prevention program at the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, in New York City. Founded in 1970 by Richard L. Murphy, Rheedlen provided after-school programs and anti-violence training for urban youths. In 1990 Canada was named president and CEO of Rheedlen, after Murphy left to become commissioner of the New York Department of Youth Services. Although the program grew significantly during the 1990s, with the number of children served rising from 1,500 to 7,000 and the annual budget increasing from $2.5 million to $15 million, Canada knew that the needs of many neighborhood children were not being met; one Rheedlen after-school program, for example, had far more applicants than available spots. “We’ve got to really do something radically different if we’re going to save these kids,” he told Paul Tough for the New York Times Magazine (June 10, 2004), referring to both those in Rheedlen’s programs and those left out. “If we keep fooling around on the fringes, I know 10 years will go by, and instead of 75 percent of the kids in Harlem scoring below grade level on their reading scores, maybe it will be 70 percent, or maybe it will be 65 percent. People will say, ‘Oh, we’re making progress.’ But that to me is not progress. This is much more urgent than that.”

Canada became determined to prove that, if given proper preparation and equal opportunities, all inner-city childrennot only the most motivated or intellectual or those from the most stable, supportive familiescould perform as well in school as average white American children. With that goal in mind, in the late 1990s he proposed to Rheedlen’s board that the organization adopt a radically new, far more expensive, holistic approach to helping children and families. To remake the board into a stronger fund-raising entity, Canada and a new board member, Stanley Druckenmillera 1975 Bowdoin alumnus, billionaire hedge-fund manager, and skilled fundraiser“politely deposed” the board’s chairman, as Tough put it. Druckenmiller took his place. Canada, Druckenmiller, and a representative from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (a longtime Rheedlen sponsor) then devised a business plan that called for an initial outlay of $6 million, with annual budgets increasing to a maximum of $46 million over the course of nine years. (The current fiscal year’s budget is $24.6 million.) By structuring the proposed program like a business rather than a nonprofit, and backed by a sympathetic board, Canada no longer had to spend valuable time seeking short-term grants; instead, he could devote much of his attention to the initiatives he planned to offer. He chose to implement his program in a 24-block area in central Harlem whose residents included some 3,400 children under the age of 18, the majority of them living below the poverty line and scoring below grade level on state reading and math tests. Canada dubbed the area, which he expanded in 2004 to encompass 60 city blocks, the Harlem Children’s Zone and launched an array of programs that offered educational, social, and medical services to residents of the zone. “The objective,” Tough wrote, was “to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can’t slip through.”

The Harlem Children’s Zone employs more than 650 people, who work on about 20 different programs. Initiatives include Harlem Gems, a program for prekindergarten students; the Family Support Center, which provides family counseling; Baby College, a class for new parents; and the after-school program Truce, which is an acronym for The Renaissance University for Community Education. Within the original 24-block zone, 88 percent of the children have participated in at least one of Canada’s programs. The HCZ Promise Academy, a charter school, is the newest and most ambitious of Canada’s projects. The academy opened its doors to 100 kindergarteners and 100 sixth-graders in the fall of 2004, with plans to add 200 new students each year until grades kindergarten through 12 are filled. As a charter school, HCZ Promise Academy is a self-governing public school that is free from some city and state education regulations, freeing its teachers and administrators to use innovative techniques that they feel best serve their students. The school, whose classes are significantly smaller than those of area public schools, runs five days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., which is an hour and a half longer per day than most New York schools. After-school programs operate until 6:00 p.m., and their school year contains 210 instructional days, extending into August, as opposed to the 180 instructional days mandated by New York State.

In April 2004 Canada held a lottery to randomly select, from among the 359 applications submitted, the children to be admitted to the HCZ Promise Academy’s first kindergarten and sixth-grade classes. The United Federation of Teachers union is skeptical of Canada’s expectations of the teachers he hires and his alliance with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, both of whom the union perceives as adversaries. Further antagonizing the teachers' union is Canada’s stated long-term goal of taking over existing neighborhood public schools and converting them into charter schools, either under the academy’s banner or modeled after it. Canada remains convinced that such drastic measures are necessary to ensure that disadvantaged Harlem youngsters have a chance to break the cycle of violence and poverty they are born into. “In communities where children are failing . . . you have to go in and change the way teaching and learning happen inside these buildings,” he told Karen Matthews of the Associated Press (September 5, 2004). “And teachers have to be in those buildings for more hours and more days if these kids are ever going to catch up.”

Canada has written extensively about his experiences, both as a child and as a community organizer, in depressed urban neighborhoods. His first book, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America (1995), was widely hailed as what Jim Bencivenga termed, in the Christian Science Monitor (June 5, 1995), “an urban coming-of-age story. Part memoir, part social reform advocacy, it contrasts the mean streets of the author’s South Bronx youth in the 1960s to the drug-and-gun culture afflicting today’s urban youth.” Canada’s next book, Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America (1998), is a broader overview of the trials boys face in urban cultures, specifically the rampant misconceptions that abound about what it means to “be a man” and the need for stronger father-son relationships. When Canada was young, he told David Gergen in an interview for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) program NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (January 20, 1998, on-line), he received the message that “if you want to be a man, you have to learn how to take it, learn how to make sure that you never cried, and you didn’t go to your mother, and you were willing to fight. We thought that meant being a man! We thought being promiscuous meant that you were a man. We thought if you could drink a bottle of wine, that you were a man.” Canada maintains that there are even fewer positive male role models for boys today than there were when he was growing up. He told Gergen, “Young boys are getting messages constantly about sex, alcohol, tobacco, clothing, sneakers, stuff that means absolutely nothing when we really look at what it means to be a caring, responsible father, a real responsible adult in today’s society.” To that end, Canada insists that following the current trend of simply advocating safe sex or abstinence is not enough, and that boys must be taught that nurturing children is not a sign of weakness or compromised masculinity.

In January 1995 Canada was honored as one of the first six individuals to receive the Heinz Award, which carries a prize of $250,000. The Heinz Awards are annual grants created in honor of the late Senator John Heinz by his widow, Teresa Heinz (now Teresa Heinz Kerry). Much like the recipients of the MacArthur “genius” grants, the Heinz Awards honorees receive their grants without prior knowledge of their candidacies. The grants have no strings attached and beneficiaries may apply the money wherever they consider it best used. Canada’s numerous other awards include the Robin Hood Foundation’s 1992 Heroes of the Year Award, the 1993 Spirit of the City Award from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bowdoin College’s 1993 Common Good Award, a Children’s Champion Award from Child magazine, and the 2004 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education. He holds honorary degrees from Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Meadville Lombard Theological Seminary, in Chicago, Illinois; the Bank Street College of Education, in New York City; and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City. Canada contributed to the essay collection The Culture of Violence (2002) and is a frequent public speaker. He hosted a 1994 PBS special entitled Jobs: A Way Out? and often appears on such television programs as Good Morning America, Today, and Nightline.

In 1983 Canada founded the Chang Moo Kwan Martial Arts School, where he is chief instructor. In addition to teaching students the principles and techniques of Tai Kwon Do, Canada, a third-degree black belt, instructs his pupils in violence-prevention methods, and the school is a nationally recognized model for its efforts. Canada has taught at the school, which offers lessons free of charge, two nights a week for 21 years.

Geoffrey Canada is the father of four children. From his first marriage, to Joyce Henderson, he has a daughter, Melina, age 35, and a son, Jerry, 32. He and his second wife, Yvonne Grant, have two sons: Bruce, 28, and Geoffrey Jr., seven.