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Ah, spring has finally arrived, and the flutter of planning that has
been building all winter is bursting forth with a buzz of activities to
raise awareness of children’s issues.
We are setting the stage with the release of a new report that exposes
the disparities between the states in child well-being. Our report,
Geography Matters, is a straightforward look at the data on children in
each state, revealing a stark contrast in their living conditions.
Geography Matters lays plain that the “widening national investment gap
in health and social programs is contributing to a wide child
well-being gap among the states.”
With a foundation in the data, we will turn to our national
politicians to enact solutions.
Every Child Matters is mobilizing child advocates across the country to
engage the politicians and the media. We hosted a training institute in
Denver in April where advocates from 38 states joined together for
intensive, hands-on training on political advocacy and public outreach.
The advocates returned to their local communities armed with new
skills, resources and connections with which to build a national
movement and reinforce our efforts.
In key election-year battleground states, we are taking a
direct approach by opening Every Child Matters field offices and
working with local partners. ECM staff in Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana,
Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Mississippi are
hitting the ground running with a formidable task of placing children’s
issues at the forefront of the Presidential—as well as
statewide—election campaigns. We will be organizing numerous public
events, speaking with the media, engaging the candidates and their
local campaigns, and building grassroots community networks.
To maximize exposure in the Presidential race, we are
particularly focused in Minnesota (St. Paul will host the GOP
convention) and Colorado (Democrats convene in Denver). We are
organizing public events with coalition partners to take full advantage
of the candidates’ presence and media attention during the Party
Conventions in late summer. Mississippi is the site of the first
Presidential Debate after the conventions, another strategically
important locale where our field operations will try to insert the
“kids agenda” in the presidential debate.
The method behind the madness is to see that the program
investment matches the politicians’ rhetoric. We are here to remind
them that denying basic needs to children doesn’t win elections.
Good federal and state programs already address the problems. Poverty
and child abuse prevention, preK education, children’s health
insurance, and after-school care all have workable solutions in place.
Yet, as we know, the program funding is stagnating. Millions of
children are still left out. The call to expand children’s programs is
being lost amongst the noise of competing interests.
Caring for America’s vulnerable children is simply a matter of
priorities for our policy-makers. It’s our duty to make sure public
officials know that their constituents’ priorities are squarely,
unequivocally on the side of improving children’s lives and futures.
 Posted by: Mick Schommer in the DC office.
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