The Crusade for Children: An Afternoon with Marian Wright Edelman

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Please be advised:  The previously published address for this event has been changed to San Francisco City Hall, Mayor Lee’s Conference Room 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Suite 200.

Year after year millions of children in this country are born into unstable environments. Instability can come from many directions—from inadequate schools to lack of resources to buy the basic needs of life such as housing and nutritious food. When 16.4 million children are poor, 8.3 million children don't have health care, and a majority of children cannot read or compute at grade level in the fourth, eighth, and 12th grades—we have a growing national crisis that demands an urgent response by all stakeholders in these politically and economically volatile times.

Please join Marian Wright Edelman to learn about The Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) that her organization has created to confront a deepening crisis faced by Black children and to call America to take action. A toxic cocktail of poverty, illiteracy, racial disparity, violence and massive incarceration is sentencing millions of children of color to dead end, powerless and hopeless lives and threatens to undermine the past half century of racial and social progress.

Target Audience

This program is free and open to NCG members. Grantmakers with a focus on children and youth are encouraged to attend.

Presenter

Marian Wright Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her career in the mid-60s when, as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. In l968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People's Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children's Defense Fund. For two years she served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University and in l973 began CDF.

Marian served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College which she chaired from 1976 to 1987 and was the first woman elected by alumni as a member of the Yale University Corporation on which she served from 1971 to 1977. She has received over a hundred honorary degrees and many awards including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings which include: Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change; The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours; Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children; Stand for Children; Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors; Hold My Hand: Prayers for Building a Movement to Leave No Child Behind; I'm Your Child, God: Prayers for Our Children; I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children; and The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.

Sponsor

Rosenberg Foundation