2021 OC Honors Luncheon – Tuesday, November 9, 2021 at 11:30 am in the Permian Ball Room at the Odessa Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. Guest Speaker: Geoffrey Canada
Odessa College wants to honor individuals and businesses who have made or continue to make significant contributions to the field of education.
SUBMIT A NOMINATION
SPONSOR A TABLE
Guest Speaker: Geoffrey Canada
In his 20-plus years with Harlem Children’s Zone, Inc., Geoffrey Canada has become nationally recognized for his pioneering work helping children and families in Harlem and as a passionate advocate for education reform.
Canada founded the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), which The New York Times Magazine called “one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time.” In October 2005, Canada was named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by US News and World Report. In 2014, he announced his retirement at the end of the school year, ensuring that he will continue to remain a passionate advocate for education and poverty issues.
In 1997, the agency launched the Harlem Children’s Zone Project, which targets a specific geographic area in Central Harlem with a comprehensive range of services. The Zone Project today covers 100 blocks and aims to serve over 10,000 children by 2011.
The New York Times Magazine said the Zone Project “combines educational, social, and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood... The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can’t slip through.”