Local officials on Wednesday announced a milestone -- $36 million in federal grants -- for an ambitious program to provide a full range of social and education services to students and their families in several neighborhoods.
The effort is called Promise Zone and targets Hollywood, Pico-Union and Koreatown. A related initiative is underway in the San Fernando Valley, centered in the Pacoima area.
“The strategy of the whole is: cradle to career,” said Dixon Slingerland, executive director of the locally based Youth Policy Institute, which is overseeing most of the federal funding. “These grants come in and fit into certain chunks of that.”
The idea, he said, is that “the school is now a community center and families can access whatever they need there.”
Families could receive services such as access to food, nutrition counseling, prenatal care, mental health services and job training, as well as extended education before and after school and during the summer.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti had lobbied for the city to be included in the federal Promise Zone program.
[For more of this story, written by Howard Blume, go to http://www.latimes.com/local/l...-20141008-story.html]
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