One of the first programs, a cornerstone of the Harlem Children's Zone, is called "Baby College." Marilyn Joseph, a longtime community activist, runs it from a storefront office on a sleepy block with more former than current businesses. Inside, the walls are painted pink and covered with baby photos. She pointed out a smiling baby Joseph, named, she says, after her.
The parenting classes are held at public schools across Harlem on Saturdays. They are free and include lessons on nutrition, discipline, literacy and health. Mothers and fathers with children 3 or younger can enroll.
To lure parents, workers arrange transportation, provide baby-sitting, serve meals and have weekly raffles for baby products and gift certificates.
About 90 percent of parents who begin the classes graduate, according to the program's records. Nearly all of the 1,000 or so graduates leave with health insurance and up-to-date immunizations for their children.
But Baby College plays an even more critical role in the program's overall success: It serves as the street-level recruiting arm for the Zone. About a dozen outreach workers spend their days knocking on doors at its two large public housing projects and many low-income swaths of houses, check-cashing businesses and laundromats.
The pitch: Wouldn't you want to be the best parent to your child?
"It's almost like a campaign," Joseph says. "We go door to door promoting ourselves."
The key to getting parents to listen to the pitch about the Zone - and then to commit to it - is respect, Joseph says. "We don't go in there with a condemning tone."
The living statistics of the Harlem Children's Zone are in Ezekiel Serrao's third-grade class at Promise Academy, one of its charter schools. Some of his classmates, fellow 8-year-olds, have been in one Zone program after another since they were infants.
Housed inside an old public school, the windowless building is nothing special. But the hallways are brimming with brightly colored art projects and the voices of children. Each classroom is named after a college - a subtle way to get these kids thinking about their futures.
The birth in 2002 of Ezekiel's younger brother, Isaiah - "the problem child," his mother calls him lovingly - was what interested Altheo Serrao in the Harlem Children's Zone. She enrolled in Baby College while he was an infant. At the time, her family was living in a domestic violence shelter in Harlem - a place that the Zone's outreach workers visit frequently.
