Geoffrey Canada

There's not a day that goes by that I don't draw on my undergraduate background in psychology. ”

Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally. ”

When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks. ”

My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff. ”

The rates of soda consumption in our poorest communities cannot be explained by individual consumer preferences alone, but rather are linked to broader issues of access and affordability of healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, and to the marketing efforts of soda companies themselves. ”

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible. ”

Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words. ”

People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better. ”

Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science. ”

My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer. ”