To Save 7,000 Children - Is That Too Much To Ask?

Geoffrey Canada runs the Harlem Children's Zone. His goal is to ensure that the poverty stricken children in Harlem, New York are provided the same access to education and services as middle-class children around the country. His Foundation is amazing and the project is enormous but the scale doesn't seem to bother him at all. You can see it in his eyes when he talks, he can't stand to leave behind even one child in the 60 block radius where the Foundation operates. He wants to save them all and who can blame him.

Harlem Children's Zone programs are many, too many to mention in one short article...all with basically a cradle to college mentality. Canada and his companions are trying to reshape the culture of the entire community, not just raise the percentage of kids that graduate from high school.

I am most impressed with a program called Baby College. Parents and soon-to-be-parents enroll in a comprehensive 9 week course that teaches them how to parent. Many of these young adults came from fractured families or traditions of neglect and depravity. They need help and a skill set to know how to effectively parent their little ones. How can they emmulate something they've never seen? They have to be shown in order to do it.

Lessons about such basic topics as proper feeding, childhood diseases, and playing with your baby are alien to many of the parents. Baby College teaches a method of discipline without hitting that will help to break the cycle of abuse and foster care.

The Harlem Children's Zone website boosts that for the sixth year in a row 100% of the kindergartners enrolled in Promise Academy, their charter school, were preforming at grade level and 97% of their 8th graders were preforming grade level math. These are astounding improvements in a community where nearly half of the teenagers don't finish high school on time.

Canada's methods are controversial in some educational circles but I applaud his efforts. He's in the trenches trying new ideas every day. What more can we ask of someone? He's so inspirational that Barack Obama has cited the Harlem Children's Zone as a model he'd like to replicate in at least 20 more inner-city communities if he is elected president in November.

With vision, it is possible to save more than a handful of the next generation.

Kevin Bardsley - 2007 Reader's Digest Hero of the Year

In April of this year over one million Reader’s Digest Readers voted to name Kevin Bardsley the RD 2007 Hero of the Year. Bardsley might have been happier never receiving the nomination. No one wants to lose a child to be called a hero.

But in Bardsley’s case he didn’t win because his son, Garrett, went missing in 2004 from a scout camping trip in Utah. He was nominated for what he did afterward and how he and his family used their grief to help others.

Garrett is still missing after three years. The Bardsleys feel certain he is not coming back and but still compile search information on their website FindGarrett.org. They intend to keep looking until their son’s body is recovered.

Kevin Bardsley wants to save other families from the ordeal of losing a child, focusing on the mountains where Garrett was lost. This area is popular with campers and scout troops like the one Garrett was with when he went missing. Bardsley started a foundation to help find children lost in the Uinta Mountains of Utah. He bought GPS tracking equipment and trained a small army of volunteers to be ready at a moments notice.

Ten months after Garrett’s disappearance, Bardsley got a call. Another scout was missing in an area only 26 miles from where Garrett was last seen. Bardsley dropped everything and headed to the mountains. He met with the parents of Brennan Hawkins, the 11 year old missing boy and joined law enforcement and his volunteers in the search.

He used the knowledge gained from searching for his own son to suggest wide sweep searches and immediate contact with the media. It worked. 3,000 additional volunteers showed up to help and after four days of exhaustive effort, Brennan was found on the other side of the mountain. Instead of going for lower ground to look for a road, as one might expect, he’d headed up the rugged terrain and over the mountain. A searcher on an ATV happened upon him drinking from a stream.

Bardsley’s efforts to help other families would be enough to garner the hero award but he has also used the money from the Garrett Bardsley Foundation to open a school in Garrett’s name in Puca Cruz, Ecuador.

Kevin Bardsley received his award in Washington DC where he said, “I think the most important thing is that we all do good wherever we are for whomever we can.”

He is truly an amazing man who lives by his values and with integrity in spite of the tragedy that struck his family and son. At FindGarrett.org, the Bardsley’s volunteers are always available to look for a missing child in Utah and always on the look out for current information about their son.