Read a free children's book online today and help the Harlem Children's Zone to promote literacy throughout New York's Central Harlem. This holiday season, the Harlem Children's Zone, in conjunction with We Give Books, aims to share 10,000 brand-new hardcover or paperback books with the thousands of youth served by its programs. Through your efforts, young people throughout the Zone will be able to celebrate the holidays and start the New Year with brand-new books of their own.

The goal of the Harlem Children's Zone is to break the cycle of generational poverty through education. HCZ targets a 97-block area in Central Harlem with a comprehensive, interlocking network of education, social service, and community-building programs that aim to remove the barriers to success for poor children so they can graduate from college and enter today's high-skills job market. These programs are designed not only to address the needs of children from birth through college, but also to strengthen the families and community around them.

HCZ's unique "pipeline to success" offers a seamless series of free programs for students who attend either the local traditional public schools or one of HCZ's two public charter schools. The underlying tenets of the Harlem Children's Zone are:

• Serving an entire neighborhood at scale
• Creating a birth-through-college pipeline of best practice programs
• Building community among parents, children, and institutions
• Rigorously evaluating programs for continuous improvement
• Cultivating a culture of success within the organization

The agency's efforts and comprehensive approach have resulted in unprecedented success, changing the trajectories of thousands of children and sparking a movement of similar efforts across the country and around the world.

Learn more about the Harlem Children's Zone by visiting www.hcz.org.