Charity ideas: early education for children of color in the US

January 24, 2018 12:58 PM

I want to give away some money (think hundreds, not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year) to assist early childhood education targeted to black kids. Can you suggest any specific charities that do good, effective work in this area? This is a smaller, narrower version of this question.
posted by Jasper Fnorde to Education (6 answers total)

Harlem Children's Zone
posted by Frank Grimes at 1:06 PM on January 24, 2018

Best answer: If you want to give hyper-locally, you can sponsor classrooms on Donors Choose.

Here are the results for just a super quick search for early grades in and near North Lawndale in Chicago, which is where I would start my search with your goals. As you can see, there's plenty of need.
posted by phunniemee at 1:10 PM on January 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

My daughter's preschool has a fund for tuiton assistance for families who are going through rough times. I'm sure others do as well. You could probably either find one i a predominantly black neighborhood or ask the daycare to earmark the funds for a family of color.
posted by aetg at 4:02 PM on January 24, 2018

Finding a local donation opprotunity with a majority-Black school or neighborhood is probably your best bet, but I can also suggest the I Have A Dream Foundation which follows an entire class of underprivileged students from elementary school onwards, gets to know them and their families, and does their best to get those specific kids through high school and into college (and offers a small scholarship, too.) Students are not always Black but you can choose the specific project you donate to.
posted by blnkfrnk at 7:18 PM on January 24, 2018

Head Start and/or a public school preschool.
posted by zizzle at 6:42 AM on January 25, 2018

Best answer: The Parent-Child Home Program isn't exclusive to black kids and families, but having volunteered with them for a year, my impression is that it's a substantial part of the population they serve. It's a great program with great outcomes. For two years per family, a trained home-visitor comes in for two, 30-minute visits per week to read and play with a parent and young child in their home. They bring books and appropriate toys to homes that often don't have them, and model playing, reading, and talking with children for parents that often haven't done those things before. The results are pretty amazing -- they halve the "at risk" rate and the special education rate measured years later, and even more years later, increase the high school graduation rate by 30% -- to the same rate as middle income students.

If you wanted something focused specifically in preschools rather than in homes, there's also an extension of their program into under-resourced family child cares (FCC's), where many low-income children spend most of their waking hours. Two big studies found that 40% of FCC's didn’t provide even “adequate” care, let alone “good,” which less than 10% achieved. TV's are often on, and there's often limited adult-child interaction.

PCHP has been around more than 50 years, but they're small enough for your donation to be significant to them. I wish every family who needed this program could be included -- I really believe it would change the world.
posted by daisyace at 8:44 AM on January 25, 2018 [2 favorites]