OPINION:
July 7, 2014 at New Bedford, Massachusetts
There is a point where we are not making it better, we are just making it different. We really need to look at how we are doing.
My personal context is simple:
I am a son of the greatest generation. I am a baby boomer. I am a son, brother, father, grandfather, uncle, cousin, godfather and friend. I was a corporate manager, then serial entrepreneur. Now in my encore career, I am a social entrepreneur and a philanthropist. I find myself at sixty-five years-old, embarrassed for the legacy of my generation.
Our social context is not as simple:
We’re “Stuck”. What is going on? Who are we as a people? Who are we as a nation? Who are we as a community? Where are we going as a society?
Climate change, pandemics, narco-trafficking, human slavery, species loss, human rights, race, class, demographics and terrorism. Plus of course; our political system, leadership, Wall Street, our food supplies, our energy supplies, our healthcare system, big pharma, corporations that pay no taxes, and the silent elephant in the room – child poverty, to name but a few.
In America, over 24 million children live in poverty, another 24 million children live in low-income households. These numbers are staggering! They translate to – In America, one of every two children (50%) live in poor or low-income households. In the developed world, the United States of America has the third or fourth highest percentage of child poverty. I cannot get my mind around 48 million American children being at-risk.
On the SouthCoast, from Newport to the Upper-Cape, over 25,000 children live in poverty, and 25,000 live in low-income households. What did these 50,000 children do wrong?
I’ve become convinced that the solution for child poverty is public education and healthy families. In a perfect world it’s a no brainer. In the world we currently live in, generations of poverty have created a dynamic that has totally collapsed what a healthy family looks like and has wreaked havoc on public education.
I meet and interact with dozens of children and adults every day. Every single person I meet wants the people that they care about to be healthy, safe, happy and living a purposeful life.
I see New Bedford as a city on a hill, a place where there are tens of thousands of loving and caring people – ultimately a place that has all the ingredients needed to redefine and to ultimately define a more caring community.
When I look for wisdom – it is all around me.
The bible tells us – “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves.”
The Talmud tells us – “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The Quran tells us that “we should treat each other as brothers and sisters and trust each other. We should not be suspicious of each other. We should always assume people are good, and only change our opinions of them when we really know they have done bad deeds. We should not be imagining the worst, and looking for faults.”
Buddha said – “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
Cesar Chavez said – “We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”
Dorothy Height said – “Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life. It’s important to the person who serves as well as the recipient. It’s the way in which we ourselves grow and develop. We’ve got to work to save our children and do it with full respect for the fact that if we do not, no one else is going to do it.”
My grandmother, who raised me, would always talk about my personal responsibility to myself, to my family, to my church, to my school and to my community – that I had an inherent responsibility to help anyone who needed help.
Our differences are important but our common humanity matters more. It’s profound because it is simple and it is true. These problems that we face, we must solve ourselves. The solution is us. It’s obviously easier said than done and on the face of it – it’s overwhelming! How do we impact child poverty? How do we build healthier families?
How do we support public education and on a much simpler level how do we support our teachers? With all the turmoil in the public schools, what I worry the most about – are the students and the teachers. While all this dysfunction, polarization, positioning, re-positioning and change is going on – the students and the teachers are at ground-zero, every single day. Who are their champions, their advocates, their partners?
A majority of an urban teacher’s time is taken up by remedial and behavioral issues. I’ve also come to understand that generations of child poverty have created seriously dysfunctional families. We’ve got thousands of children living in upside-down families, where children are not held to any serious expectations and when they come to school they’re nowhere close to being ready to learn.
What can we do to help teachers? What can we do to rebuild PTO’s? How do we support building healthier families?
We need to ask teachers what we can do to help them. Teachers, after parents are some of the most important adults in children’s lives. We need to re-build our culture around honoring, protecting, supporting and fairly evaluating our teachers.
We’re committed at GiftsToGive to initiate programs and events to honor teachers and to start to rebuild PTO’s. We’re actively recruiting retired teachers and para-professionals to help us lead and organize this effort.
We must begin now and it does not need to be daunting. We do lots of simple, small things first. Supporting adult volunteers in early literacy initiatives is critical, so is volunteer tutoring and mentoring. We have the people we need to make the change. We have dozens of social service agencies, we have dozens of non-profits. We have a teacher’s union, hundreds of teachers and school administration, a school committee, we have city hall and dozens of community groups. We have local businesses, we have universities and colleges in our back yard.
No one is capable of being in possession of the whole truth or the entire solution. I think we owe everyone a certain presumption of respect until they do something to forfeit it and we should all be listening. Then we should start acting/volunteering.
We’re stuck in the negative, in the status-quo. Getting un-stuck is not rocket science, what it takes is a different mind-set. I think that changing a mind-set could very easily start with volunteering. Volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. We vote in elections every so often, but when we volunteer, we vote every single time we volunteer, about the kind of community we want to live in.
There are dozens of places to volunteer, if you need help getting started visit giftstogive.org.
July 7, 2014 at New Bedford, Massachusetts
Jim Stevens
CEO and Founder, GiftsToGive
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