child care - Digital Library Collections

TRaDUCTION
COF's 1998 Priorities
• Ensuring every-not every other-American child a Healthy Start in life. We seek to ensure
effective state implementation of the recently enacted $48 billion State Children's Health
Insurance Program (CHIP), to educate families about CHIP and Medicaid, and to enroll all
eligible children.
• Ensuring every child a Head Start in life by providing parents quality, affordable child care
options for all preschool and school-age children, with the assistance ofemployers, community
institutions, and federal, state, and local governments.
• Ensuring every child a Fair Start in life by educating the public and policy makers about the
unacceptable moral, human, and economic costs of permitting 14.5 million children to grow
up poor and by mobilizing the nation to end child poverty as we know it. Jobs with decent
wages, community economic development, and a quality education for every child must
become overarching national priorities.
• Ensuring every child a Safe Start in life by preventing violence against and by children. Every
community must be safe from violent adult and youth offenders. But we oppose the growing
criminalization of youths, especially minority youths, and the detention of nonviolent youth
offenders and children who are truants and runaways in adult jails, a practice forbidden by
current law. We support more effective community-based prevention and interventions like
after-school and summer programs, mentoring, and parent training.
• Ensuring every child a Moral Start in life through creative leadership development and
community capacity building to ensure an intergenerational cadre of effective servant-leaders
committed to building and sustaining a movement to Leave No Child Behind.
tals, or Hollywood blind us to the unjust budgets
and laws that enrich the rich and impoverish the
poor, increase the gaps between the have-toomuchs
and the have-not-enougbs, and maintain the
status quo in our society and world.
Do not be deterred by critics. Sojourner Truth,
an illiterate but brilliant slave woman, when told
that the building where she was about to speak
would be burned if she attempted to address her
waiting audience, replied, "Then I will speak to the
ashes." A famous evangelist, confronted by a critic
saying "I don't like your way of doing things," replied,
"I am not very satisfied with them myself.
How do you do it?" "Oh, I don't do that sort of
thing," the critic responded. "In that case," the
preacher said, "I prefer my way of doing it to your
way ofnot doing it." Just keep saying what children
need, and keep working and mobilizing until those
needs are put first in our nation regardless ofopinion
poll politics.
S. We must never lose hope and make it contagious.
Pass it around. South African President Nelson
Mandela in his inaugural speech reminded us,
"As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give
other people permission to do the same." Czech
Republic President Vaclav Havel defmes hope as
an orientation of the spirit that transcends immediate
experiences: "It is not the conviction that something
will turn out well, but the certainty that something
makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
The more unpropitious the situation in which we
demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. It is this
hope, above all, which gives us the hope to live and
continually try new things, even in conditions that
seem hopeless as ours do here and now."
Who would have predicted oppressive apartheid's
peaceful overthrow in South Africa and Nelson
Mandela walking out of prison after 27 years
ramrod straight, preaching reconciliation and forgiveness?
Who would have believed that the walls
of the Soviet and East European communism
would crumble in a heap, as much from decay
within as from enemies without? Who thought that
child advocates could get the legislative dream
team ofconservative Utah Republican Orrin Hatch
CHI L D R EN' S D E F ESE FUN D xxi