Allison De Marco's blog

After 6 years (term limits!) of service with the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness Leadership Team, the last few as chair, my run ends with 2018.  Throughout the month of December I’ve been curating a series of tweets talking about the state of homelessness in Orange County and nationally and the work that we and our partners are doing to make homelessness “rare, brief, and one-time.”  

You can take a look at the full twitter archive here to learn about our partners, our successes, our needs, and ways you can help end homelessness in Orange County.

At a meeting last week with many local nonprofit leaders, I learned something not too surprising – the nonprofits in Orange County are largely run by white folks with accompanying huge disparities in assets and revenue when compared to those run by people of color. Across the Triangle, such nonprofits primarily serve communities of color. And according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, this is the case across the US. I’m not going to tell you why you should care that, like other sectors, the wealth of our nonprofits is concentrated in the hands of white people.  It has been written about here (racial wealth gap) and here (nonprofit diversity).  But I do want to share our local stats so we have an accurate picture of what we’re facing.

Recently, the Orange County Health Department launched plans for the Family Success Alliance, modeled after the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone. 

With its inception as the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in 1970, the Harlem Children’s Zone aims to disrupt generational poverty with a holistic, long-term approach providing education and support from early childhood through college, supportive services to families to prevent homelessness, and health services including obesity prevention.  Serving over 13,000 children and 13,000 adults in 97 blocks of Central Harlem, the engaged children (70% in the served blocks) have a 92% college acceptance rate, 100% of pre-K participants are assessed as school ready, and the 800 local employees fuel economic growth.  The Harlem Children’s Zone also serves as the Model for President Obama’s Promise Neighborhood Initiative that has awarded 58 grants to communities across the country to implement similar programs.