Our leaders across the country gathered at our annual summit
Our Affiliate Network
According to the most recent data available, roughly 25 percent of all African American children live in abject poverty. The high rate of poverty is more a result of under-resourced communities and schools than a matter of personal failure. With boots on the ground, these are challenges that can be solved!
To help meet that goal, National CARES, founded as Essence CARES, has built a 58-city Affiliate Network of local, respected leaders. They have committed to ensuring that the children in their communities have the mentoring, support, and guidance they need to thrive.
Our Affiliate Leaders have recruited, trained, and placed more than 250,000 volunteer mentors who have served more than 350,000 young people. We are the nation’s leader, not only in recruitment and placement of critically needed African American mentors, but in their retention. We serve all children in need and embrace all qualified mentors.
Our leaders anchor our organization’s transformative and life-saving programmatic work. They are elemental to what is now our Blueprint for Recovery, A New Way Forward, a plan that grew its wings from Marian Wright Edelman's adage "it takes a village to raise a child."
Across our hardest and harshest times, success was guaranteed by villages of wise and loving adults who led the children of their communities towards excellence in mind, body and spirit. Susan L. Taylor founded National CARES because the village was–and is–on fire!
The charge, then, of the National CARES Mentoring Movement and its Affiliate Leaders Network, is to be the healing waters.
For more information about our network, please contact Gregory Corbin, Vice President of Affiliate Services at gcorbin@caresmentoring.org.
