OUR
KIDS AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP
Wingspread Journal, Winter 1996
CHILDREN AND YOUTH
REFLECTIONS
Richard Kinch, Senior Program Officer
The Johnson Foundation
"What can I do
to help?"
The Johnson Foundation, like other philanthropic
organizations, has asked this question: What can we
do with our resources to improve the lives of our
children and youth? Our answer is that we wish to
"support efforts to encourage and support significantly
more productive engagement of adults in the lives
of children and youth."
It will help if we are prepared to look at our kids-all
kids-not as problems to be fixed but as promises to
be fulfilled. This is one of the messages of the "Random
Acts of Asset Building" article on page 7: we
might better base our thinking and our actions on
assets rather than deficits.
Elsewhere in this issue of the Wingspread Journal,
the words of Urie Bronfenbrenner explain why without
adult engagement other youth-directed efforts will
have limited success.
It may be difficult, however, to persuade adults-including
parents-to become more engaged in the lives of young
people. Nevertheless, probably nothing else has a
chance of prevailing against the injunction to have
rather than be, the alluring and irresistible materialism
in which we are immersed. The engagement of even dedicated
parents cannot prosper in a culture that is indifferent
to children, let alone in one that is hostile or exploitative,
as described by John Silber on page 11.
But if you want to do something for kids, there is
a great deal that lies between the specificity of
personal commitment and the huge and intractable menace
of contemporary culture. There are the "mediating
structures" that help the young and their families
to negotiate the outside world: neighborhoods, voluntary
associations, churches, schools. There are also the
numerous social programs that should be accessible
resources to those who need them, which means almost
all of us, at one time or another.
This issue of the Wingspread Journal intends to describe
some of those. Family volunteering and lifelong service
programs contain some core ideas. Anne Cohn Donnelly,
on page 21, reports on initiatives that are preventive,
non-stigmatizing, based on knowledge, and supported
by both the public and private sectors.
But even programs designed by angels and funded by
the national debt will not by themselves save many
of our kids. They are necessary but not sufficient.
The question remains: "What can I do to help?"
During the next few years, The Johnson Foundation
seeks to encourage the ideas that will provide some
of the answers to that question. Perhaps we will need
to think in terms of a radical culture shift, broadly
recreating a social environment that is friendly to
children and their parents (as today's environment
is not). We may need to examine our educational and
social service programs and insist that they act as
though their chief purpose is to protect and nurture
and instruct.
The Foundation will also continue to encourage collaboration-among
the providers of social services, agencies, and funders,
of course-but also across sectors. We need alliances
that include business, law enforcement, nursing and
public health, and the churches, especially the black
churches, which have a long and honorable history
of social action.
We should also remember to consult our young people,
regularly and often. And we must find things for kids
to do that count, that have value for others. It is
a calamity not to learn while young to care for others.
In a recent editorial, Washington Post columnist
William Raspberry called for a serious, national conversation
on how we can best bring children to responsible adulthood.
"We need to work out new arrangements for men
and women, for families and for communities-arrangements
that make it possible once again to put children where
they belong: at the center." To do that, we may
need to shift our culture in the direction of re-engaging
adults in the lives of children and youth. At The
Johnson Foundation, we'd like to help make that happen.
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