MERIDEN - Marisol Estrada Soto remembers riding her bike as a child from her home on the corner of Liberty and Twiss streets down to Pratt Street.

"We never thought twice about it," Estrada Soto said. "It's very different now. It's not as safe as it used to be."

Estrada Soto left the neighborhood in the 1990s and doesn't like the way it looks today - boarded up homes, street crime and drugs - a much bleaker community than the one she remembers.

Today Estrada Soto is a parent leader who understands the value of strong communities and what they need to grow and thrive.

She and about 20 other parents and community leaders sat down about a year ago to discuss boosting the prospects for the future of poor children in city neighborhoods. By coincidence and need, her old neighborhood was targeted.

"As we worked to implement strategies in the plan, we became aware of the Harlem work and thought that a lot of that effort would make sense here in Meriden," said David Radcliffe, director of the Children First Initiative in Meriden. "Those at the table have worked together for years on other projects for families. Talking about the Children Zone is a natural extension of the many good works already underway in town."

The Meriden Early Childhood Council drafted a blueprint for a Meriden Children Zone within the Miller, Twiss, Liberty, Pratt street and Mills public housing area.

The objective was to target a lower-income city neighborhood to improve health, early learning and self-sufficiency outcomes for young children. About 15 local agencies, including the city's Police Department and Health Department, and the Child Guidance Clinic, have agreed to become zone partners.

This means, instead of waiting for families to discover programs that can help them, the programs come to them. The philosophy is that by lifting community members they raise and sustain each other through pride in shared successes among children and adults.

The idea of the zone also fit in with the city's redevelopment plan for the downtown area and city officials pledged their support, Radcliffe said.

After receiving several grants, the Meriden Children's Zone has hired two part-time social workers to locate participating families within the zone. It expects to reach 10 to 15 families initially and expand.

Children First has secured funding from a variety of private sources, including the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the Cuno Foundation and the Napier Foundation. It is also getting a $5,000 Community Development Block Grant from the city and could be eligible for more funding.

The Meriden Children's Zone won't be creating new programs, but reaching out to parent and community partners on the best ways to utilize them to effect the greatest change.

Family referrals will come from social service, educational, and medical agencies within the community. The workers will begin their family interviews in January.

The Children's Zone is modeled after the now famous Harlem Children's Zone, founded 40 years ago in the gritty projects of Harlem, N.Y. The program grew from a three-block, five-children experiment into a 97-block living model where new and at times controversial ideas about addressing poverty are being tried, tested and showing tangible results.

The Harlem Children's Zone was founded by Geoffrey Canada, who concluded that in order to help poor kids compete with their middle-class peers you had to change their lives - schools, neighborhoods and even their parents' child-rearing skills.

"Canada's mission is to flood the zone with educational, social, and medical services, to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through," author Paul Tough writes in "Whatever it Takes," a book chronicling the Children's Zone experiment.

Early last year, President Obama called it a model for about 20 programs the federal government wants to start in the inner cities.

The Meriden Children's Zone is one of only a few in the country the Harlem founders have selected to help start. Members of the city group visited the Harlem program and witnessed results firsthand.

Certified public accountant David Lake attended a two-day conference on the program and met with staff members, volunteers and community partners.

"It was the best conference I had ever been to," Lake said. "The program here would be much smaller and what it could do for the community could be huge."

Lake owns Lake Financial Services on Broad Street and also sits on the board of the Napier Foundation. The foundation has given Meriden Children's Zone a three-year financial commitment.

Part of the plan is to have the outreach workers conduct home visits to help families. There will be incentives for families who make regular effort and progress. Incentives include gift cards and other goods and services.

Some immediate outcomes that will be measured relate to early literacy, health and family support. The group is developing a data management system to track the progress families are making over time, and show the overall impact of efforts in the zone, Radcliffe said.

"If children are healthier, and do better in school and families are more secure, then that's a success," Radcliffe said. "If kids and their parents are not better off as a result of the zone, then we'll need to go back to the drawing board. It's in all our interests to make this succeed, whether or not we have school-aged children or not."

Radcliffe said some challenges could be family mobility and the economic downturn. Because family income determines much about a child's success, career and skill training is another component of the program.

"As a community, we'll have to weather this storm," Radcliffe said, "not just for families in the zone, but for all of us who are struggling."

Once the zone is in play, its resources could be used by families not enrolled in the program to get help and access to needed services, Radcliffe said. Without such a change in services to poor families and communities, the cost to educate unprepared schoolchildren grows, and the local workforce can't compete for jobs.

"This is a program that is going to take some time to build," Lake said. "In any program like this, there is some low-hanging fruit that can be garnered immediately."

mgodin@record-journal.com

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