Long before the National CARES Mentoring Movement was born, I understood this unshakable truth: Everything we need to secure our children and safeguard our future is in our hearts and hands.
 

The caring and committed have always been our children’s protective shield.  I witnessed  that safety coming of age in Harlem—and over the decades I spent leading Essence and traveling to to communities across our nation. 

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And for the last 20 years, I have borne witness to it across the 58 U.S.-city CARES universe where our compassionate and devoted Affiliate leaders have recruited,  trained, and connected  multitudes of volunteer mentors to under-resourced community schools, youth-support organizations and detention centers. More than 250,000 CARES volunteer mentors have signed up  and supported over 350,000 struggling children, helping them to shift their consciousness, stay strong and focused rather than losing ground. 

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Stand with us, please, for our beloved children who bear wounds not of their making, but are made to believe result from their own inadequacies, when, in fact, they are predictable outcomes of generational poverty and enduring societal neglect.  CARES exists to help heal those wounds. This is our work–the sacred labor of building partnerships and pathways that mend what has been broken so our children can heal, learn, and thrive lifelong.

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The pandemic deepened the losses among our most vulnerable young. Children in families struggling to make ends meet experienced the death of parents and caregivers in multiples the rate of children in middle-class and affluent families. Low-wage households without insurance or sufficient savings caused families already in crisis to fall apart.  The ranks of children in foster care swelled. Like poverty,  loss of parent is a significant factor in the depression that drives suicide. That death by suicide has risen 144 percent among our young–faster and greater than for any other group–points to our babies pain.

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But there is a reality more powerful than those tragic truths: No pain is greater than our collective moral resolve to provide healing and cure. Our history tells us so! Our foreparents living in harder and harsher times than these still envisioned and created triumphant paths for those not yet born. They showed us that victory is not only our past, but our identity, our destiny.

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National CARES has a blueprint for recovery and transformation. It works!. My ask of you is to commit to sustaining CARES and the precious children we serve. A caring community is their greatest hope–and ours. Advancing our young in crisis is not just an act of compassion, it is the very work each of us was born to do, the work that will shape our lives, our nation’s future–and  help build the America the Beautiful we all long for. 

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Together, we will restore lives and elevate promise. We already hold the remedies, the resources, and above all, the spirit of love that created us and advanced us–the fortunate ones. Living love–it’s the only way forward for each of us, for us all. Let us link arms and aims and do the work!