New Orleans is a small, and very lively city with narrow streets and side walks where everybody is in close contact. There are the usual families, dog walkers, strollers, mothers pushing baby carriages, and working people. Some streets are lively with lots of talented musicians, magicians and gymnasts. These people pay a fee to the city for space to perform, and the streets are blocked from traffic for them. Many of them attract a good crowd and are paid well for skilled entertainment.
In addition, there are unskilled people who attempt to attract attention and spare change. Some are playing string instruments, singing, dancing or sadly, shouting out to no one in particular. These are people who are extremely poor and need spare change. Perhaps they need a drink or drugs, but just as likely they need soap, toothpaste, quarters for the laundry, and a cup of coffee, or spare change to communicate with family or friends.
If you will attend the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Providence at the end of June, 2014, please join Promise the Children on Sunday, June 29th for breakfast and a program from 8:30 – 10:00 am at Providence Courtyard by Marriott across from the Providence RI Convention Center. Our program will focus on the 50 year old War on Poverty and show that fair funding of programs that support poor children have been effective in alleviating poverty and providing a read more…
Here is an account of father-daughter love posted on the May 2nd page of ted.npr.org. Happily there is a kind Sheriff in Richmond County, VA. He believes that when family members are welcomed into jails, and reinforce their relationship with their imprisoned family member, there is less chance of recidivism. He wants people to stay out of jail. Sometime ago, a large number of teen-aged girls, supported by their organization, Girls for a Change, wrote the Sheriff and asked if read more…
There are many more families looking for affordable housing than there are available units. The result is increasing homelessness, and dislocation for families and their children. The decrease in jobs for less skilled workers, the 2008 failure of the private home ownership program, and the lack of funding for housing vouchers, are creating costly homelessness. Many cannot afford the rents that are charged against their ever-decreasing income from low-waged jobs.
Homelessness is preventable but every year, hundreds of thousands of American families become homeless, including more than 1.6 million children, and thousands of young people in their early 20s. Prevention is possible if we; (1) increase the number of unskilled jobs, and the minimum wage, and (2) Build or renovate more affordable housing, and fund more subsidies for eligible families and individuals so they can rent existing housing. Promise the Children offers annual workshops to highlight this pathetic problem and solutions in the Boston area.
Children are too easy to forget. In our society where we turn a blind eye towards what is within sight today and what will become a significant part of tomorrow. We forget that there is nothing so valuable as the developing mind, so perfect as the growing body, and so sacred as the developing child. Why not give our attention to children’s day so that we can appreciate those who have been born to us today and will join us as citizens tomorrow?
We have pushed children aside, cut their school meals, restricted funding for their health care, and cut subsidies for their head start programs. Over recent years, we have cut funding for their K-12 public school education, eliminating sports, arts, technology, music and drama. It’s easy. Children have no political voice, and their parents are in the minority.
While New Orleans provides scarce funding for children with special needs, and few community supports compared to the Boston, MA suburbs, the KIPP schools in New Orleans are doing a great job at creating a calm and caring learning environment in their classrooms. Progressively minded people should take a look at a classroom in session before labeling the KIPP discipline as “harsh.” Charter schools are improving the lives of some very disadvantaged children who might not have learned to read at all in public schools available to them prior to Katrina.
Sequestration will cut the subsidies for 70,000 children attending Head Start. These children are at risk of swelling the pipeline to prison.
Every child is sacred. Their birth is sacred as is their capacity to love and be loved, to grow, and to learn. As youngsters, we have a huge capacity to absorb knowledge. As adults we have a serious responsibility to develop trusting relationships with our children and to give them the opportunity to learn, if not at home then at a licensed preschool.
