Lee Koch, principal of Prince Ibraham Elementary School, said it was Tough’s book that first inspired community leaders in Winston-Salem to look into the possibility of identifying one neighborhood as a potential Promise Neighborhood.

2. In Kinston, N.C., community leaders have joined forces with faculty and graduate students from the University of North Carolina’s Community-Campus Partnership to create the Kinston Promise Neighborhood. According to this article in ENC Today, the neighborhood will cover 81 blocks in the city’s East Kinston and Mitchelltown neighborhoods.

3. In Athens, Georgia, the Whatever It Takes initiative (which I visited last December) presented their initial plans for the Athens Promise Neighborhood to community members in May. Details here.

4. And in June, a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio filed this report on the 250-block St. Paul Promise Neighborhood, which “hopes to counteract the effects of poverty on children by creating a network of so-called ‘cradle-to-career’ services.”

In the end, the success of Promise Neighborhoods will depend on how well individual communities like Athens implement the fundamentals of the Harlem Children’s Zone, he said.

“Whether these programs succeed or fail will not be decided in Washington D.C.,” Tough said. “It will be decided in communities like these. If we can use this moment to gather the right resources and people and spirit in places like Athens, I think we have a chance to make a real and lasting difference for the kids who need our help the most.”

“It’s so exciting,” said Ryan Lewis, communications director for Whatever It Takes. “Paul has been talking on an international level about what we’re trying to do here. … Because we’ve done such great work, we’re able to bring somebody like that to the community, and bring even more information and have a dialogue here.”

We *just* received tons of boxes via UPS: they contain 200 copies of Paul Tough’s WHATEVER IT TAKES for the Dec. 2nd event at UGA. We’re looking forward to selling these books to you so that you can have Mr. Tough sign them. We’ve helped with several events before, but never one this big (or, arguably, this significant for the Athens community).

Janet, one of the bookstore’s owners, adds this tempting offer:

if you live in Athens, we can arrange for you to get the book before then with no shipping cost (as I’ll drop it off myself).

Tough’s knowledge of Canada’s work should be of great local interest. In recent months, a new local initiative patterned after Canada’s work called “Whatever It Takes” (www.witathens.org) was formed to address the poverty problem, by setting a goal that by July 1^st, 2020 every child in Athens-Clarke County will be on track to graduate from some sort of post-secondary education.

There’s some anticipatory coverage of the talk in the Athens Banner-Herald. And on Beyond the Trestle, a local news and politics blog, there’s a pep talk from the good people at Avid Bookshop in Athens, who will be selling books at the event.

One of the winners was the Whatever It Takes initiative from Athens, Georgia, which I blogged about back in July. This story from the Athens Banner-Herald explains the organization’s future plans:

If the group doesn’t receive federal funds to implement the plan, Whatever it Takes volunteers will continue to seek donations of time or cash from foundations, individuals and other service agencies both near and far, according to Lewis Earnest, chairman of the board for Family Connection/Communities in Schools of Athens.

“We’ve got some investment capital and we believe that we can show other people, other foundations and individuals and state and local government that we’ve got a good plan,” Earnest said.

And from Athens, Georgia, a report on the Whatever It Takes initiative:

The name “Whatever It Takes” was taken from the title of a book by Paul Tough, an account of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a large-scale social service project that inundates children in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood with educational and health services aimed at turning them into college graduates. Following the Obama Administration’s announcement of the Promise Neighborhood grant in April, the U.S. Department of Education stated that the program would be based in part on the Harlem Children’s Zone model. Even so, Earnest and Johnson say that WIT is not intended to be a replication of that project.

Here’s a video from Athens, introduced by Michael Stipe:

Who is likely to get the Promise Neighborhoods designations? Potential applicants are sorting through their competitive advantages and disadvantages. Those with histories of foundation support and backing have something of a leg up in generating matching dollars, such as the Highline School District in and around Seattle, which boasts a decade of involvement from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections project. An impending Los Angeles County application boasts the involvement of a funders consortium including the California Endowment and the Annenberg Foundation. For the Dwight neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, long the focus of planning efforts over the years, the presence of Yale as a neighbor constitutes a level of institutional and technical credibility.

Meanwhile, there was plenty of local coverage of specific applicants, including stories, editorials, and letters from Charleston, South Carolina; Rochester, New York; St. Paul, Minnesota; Norwich, Connecticut; Athens, Georgia; Las Vegas; northeast Ohio; and a Native American community in rural Colorado.

- a conference on a “multicultural/multiracial future” this Sunday at my church: Middle Collegiate Church, in New York City

- a fundraising luncheon for Mainspring Schools in Austin on April 29.

- education conferences organized by my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, next month in Atlanta and New Orleans.

- an event on May 16 at the Holton Career and Resource Center in Durham, N.C., organized by the East Durham Children’s Initiative.

- a school-readiness symposium in Baltimore on May 18, organized by Ready at Five.