Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

Hi, I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today, a talk from Kwame Owusu Kessie. He works with children as

CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone. His organization has helped change thousands of

young lives in Harlem by trying to change entire neighborhoods.

In his TED 2020 talk, Kwame shares what he's learned, what works to solve economic and public health problems in poor communities and how these solutions could work

for the entire country.

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It is such a blessing to work at the Harlem Children's

Zone, an African American led-led organization that has pioneered

the field of comprehensive place-based services from cradle to career. And that

word comprehensive is so key to what we do. You know, most interventions focus on one piece of a complicated giant puzzle,

but that's not enough to solve a puzzle. You don't solve education without understanding the home context of the home environment of our young scholar,

or the broader context of health, nutrition, or criminal justice.

The unit of change for us is not the individual child.

It's the entire neighborhood.

You have to do multiple things at the same time.

And we have 20 years of data to prove that this works.

We've had 7,000 graduates of our baby college.

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