Promises To Keep:
The Obama Poverty Plan

Late last year, President Barack Obama signed into law an appropriations bill that includes $10 million toward launching a new national antipoverty initiative called Promise Neighborhoods. The initiative will fund 20 programs around the country modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone – but much remains unknown about exactly how the program, which Obama's campaign began developing more than two years ago, will work.

Those plans would be for comprehensive neighborhood programs that resemble the Harlem Children's Zone's “pipeline”-style approach of reaching children from a high-poverty area at birth and taking them through a series of intensive services and programs intended to keep them on the track to college graduation.

'Something we were serious about'

According to Heather Higginbottom, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council to the White House, the Harlem Children's Zone had been on Obama's radar for some time, in part because of his work as a community organizer in Chicago before holding local public office.

As his campaign was putting together its urban poverty agenda, Obama asked Higginbottom, who was then the campaign's policy director, and her team to take a closer look at how different antipoverty programs around the country were faring, and how federal government might play a role.

"He was familiar with the work of the Zone and what Geoff was doing, and asked us to really go and look at it and understand what was going on," said Higginbottom, referring to HCZ founder and CEO Geoffrey Canada. "We went directly to the Zone. Geoff will tell you, at first he didn't really get what we were up to. He was like, 'What, you want to do this in other places?'"

"Once [HCZ] realized that this was something we were serious about and that we had a shot at winning, I mean they got really serious about providing the support and leadership we would need to implement this," Higginbottom added. After Obama's presidential win, Canada met with members of his transition team to keep developing the proposal.

According to the DOE budget overview, if the programs that get planning grants lead to promising projects and partnerships, they will be eligible to receive implementation grants the following year. Beyond that documentation, DOE is mum so far on the initiative – a spokeswoman would only say that further information and a call for grant applications will appear on the department website “soon.”

Educated guesses

In the absence of official guidelines for one of the most significant federal antipoverty initiatives in decades, observers and advocates are mapping out what they see as the likely shape of the imminent program.

In one recent report, the United Neighborhood Centers of America/Alliance for Children and Families (UNCA-AFC), provides its take on measures communities may have to take in order to remain successful Promise Neighborhoods. They'll have to meet the historical challenge of compartmentalization of federal programs that often deal with inter-related problems – joblessness, homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse, for example – in isolation from one another. These program “silos” tend to inhibit a comprehensive approach – which is one hallmark of HCZ – because each government agency involved has its own rules and jurisdiction, making it hard for each agency to communicate and collaborate with the others, the report says.