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The Harlem Children’s Zone® (HCZ) and the Brazelton Touchpoints Center engaged in ‘collaborative consultation’ to co-create early childhood and parent support programming. This collaboration is the story of a community coming together to reclaim and reconstruct environments for raising children and to connect adult caregivers to support each other in that process. A relational, developmental, strengths-based, and culturally grounded approach was employed to build mutual respect, trust, and understanding over time in authentic relationships required for shared learning, and for programme development and improvement. The inherent and culturally rooted strengths and resources of parents, and other family and community members mutually reinforced each other as contexts and conditions were created in which these caregivers could come together to activate their community’s collective problem-solving capacity, to share their dreams for their children, and to provide emotional support and concrete resources for each other.

Chapter twelve calls for a renewal of the “small is beautiful” movement and explores how the benefits of growing up in a village can be recreated in urban settings. The author presents E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, and its relationship to contemporary concepts, such as sustainability and the circular economy. that focus on sustaining human-scaled communities rather than on growing the GDP. The author describes and compares two initiatives that mobilize the strength of collaborative community to benefit at risk children and youth. The first is set in the city of Naples, in southern Italy, where a parish priest named Antonio Loffredo tapped the energy and aspirations of young people to build a collaborative community cooperative in an inner city neighbourhood called La Sanita’, as an alternative to the lure of organized crime. The second is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), founded in the historically black neighbourhood of New York City by Geoffrey Canada, to prove that black children, given a fair start, could achieve the American dream. While similar in many ways, each initiative was shaped by and reflects the macrosystemic values of the surrounding culture.

Chapter 4 focuses on how Pastor reinvents the social role of the street pastor for the digital street era. The chapter examines Pastor’s uses of social media and mobile communication to anticipate youth violence and mobilize neighborhood adults. But Pastor’s intervention falls short of lasting peace. This chapter discusses the possibilities and limitations of Pastor’s role within the bigger question of what adults other than police can do to control teenagers involved in street conflict. It draws on the author’s experience “running with Pastor,” which reveals the broad scope of Pastor’s online and offline operation as well as its practical shortcomings outside the umbrella of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

Across the 20th century and now a decade into the 21st, reformers have repeatedly seen the rationalization of schooling as the solution to the nation’s educational ills. Reformers have repeatedly claimed that by setting standards, using tests to measure progress towards those standards, and holding teachers accountable for progress, student achievement would improve and schools would better satisfy the goals of their external constituents. Conversely, educators have repeatedly countered that such a mechanistic model imposes a set of business values that should be foreign to schools; assigns responsibility to schools that belongs in part with families and neighborhoods; and in the name of science, squeezes out critical humanistic priorities of schooling. Round and round we go, with no end in sight. This chapter steps back from the details of such movements to look at the broader patterns, lessons, and implications of the repeated efforts to rationalize schools. One set of questions is about causes and patterns. Why, despite modest results, has so much energy been repeatedly expended in trying to rationalize schools? What patterns are common across time? Are the sources particular to education, or are there common causes that explain the rise of accountability movements in medicine, higher education, and other fields? And why have educators been comparatively less able to resist external accountability than practitioners in other fields? A second set of questions concerns the deeper assumptions embedded in efforts to rationalize schools. Choices we make about how to reform schools reflect a broader set of values about what we want for our students, how we regard our teachers, and what our vision of educational improvement is. More specifically, what are our assumptions about individual psychology, organizational sociology, and human nature? Why, at least in recent years, has the school reform movement combined such an optimistic, even utopian vision of what is possible for students with such a pessimistic, behaviorist view of how teachers need to be incentivized and motivated?