The Great Escape

At the Sheraton conference—co-sponsored by the Harlem Children's Zone and PolicyLink, a California-based research and advocacy nonprofit with ties to the Obama administration— Canada drapes a lanky arm across the lectern as he speaks, sliding the mic from its stand, and moves downstage to confide in the audience. Two giant screens bracket the stage, placed cater-corner in the vast ballroom space. When his stories build to an emotional height, Canada takes a precisely folded milk-white hanky from his inside suit-coat pocket and dabs at his brow and the corners of his mouth, a gold bracelet gleaming on his wrist. Polished and passionate, undeniably driven but charmingly self-effacing, Canada's not shy to put himself in the punch line of an anecdote or to use the silence between his words to hit hard truths square on: He is a master of his message, and his presence—his story, his vision, his dedication and his drive—anchors the work that has made him a rock star in the universe of education reform.

Although he now lives in a Long Island suburb, Canada is a son of the South Bronx who grew up tough on Union Avenue. "We were the poorest welfare cheats there ever was," Canada wrote in his 1995 memoir-manifesto, Fist Stick Knife Gun. One of four brothers in a single-parent household, Canada knew he was different: He was placed in honors classes in grade school, apart from the other kids on the block. Yet he hewed to the honor code of the street, fighting when challenged (and sometimes when not). Then, he got a break: a move to the suburbs to live with his grandparents. Canada escaped.

Educated at Bowdoin College in Maine, Canada earned a graduate degree in education at Harvard in 1975. In 1983, after a stint teaching at and eventually leading a school for troubled youth in Boston, he returned to New York City and began work at the Rheedlen Foundation, a nonprofit that aimed to reduce truancy in Harlem.

At Rheedlen, Canada started to form the ideas that would become the HCZ fabric. One passion was teaching a weekly tae kwon do class, where respect, discipline, order and focus were both cultivated and required. But more students wanted to take tae kwon do than could sign up; a long waitlist formed. Inevitably, some were left out. Over time, this became a motif: There were more children in need than there were programs and classes to serve them. Canada grew increasingly frustrated with Rheedlen's inability to reach a broad swath of Harlem's kids.

He came to believe that unless every child received ample support, the cycle of poverty that has long hobbled Harlem would never be broken.

Canada worked with and eventually replaced Rheedlen director Richard Murphy, who joined the Dinkins administration as commissioner of youth services. As commissioner, Murphy championed the creation of Beacon community centers, which were sited in public schools and meant to provide after-hours community resources and academic and social supports to local youth. With Murphy's authority and Canada's leadership, Rheedlen's after-school and anti-truancy programs evolved to become the city's first Beacon centers.

At about the same time, Children's Defense Fund (CDF) founder and president Marian Wright Edelman convened a new group, the Black Community Crusade for Children, and invited Canada to be part of it. The group met every year at the rural-Tennessee farm of Roots author Alex Haley. Even as Canada found solace in the gathering of likeminded leaders, his discouragement grew: The problems they all recognized as critical threats to poor, urban youth were only increasing in the wake of rising gun violence, the ready availability of crack cocaine, growing rates of incarceration and abysmally low academic achievement in America's poorest communities.