Champions for Kids hosts Global Leadership Conference
By Janie Pritchett-Clark
The term best practice has gotten a lot of play in the business world in the last decade. When you think of the term, you may envision an efficiency process or a set of standards. If you’re a visionary, you might see it as a checklist of the brightest, most engaging, most ideal ways to reach a happy ending.
If you’re Adelaide Schaeffer of Champions for Kids, Billy Shore of Share Our Strength, Dr. Ron Ferguson from the Kennedy School of Government, philanthropy expert and author Steve Goldberg, or David Gergen from Harvard -- best practices is not a term you can bundle around what America is doing for its youth.
• 44 million Americans now live below poverty. One in every five kids lives in poverty.
• Here in Arkansas 360,000 children get free or reduced school lunch. All are eligible for free breakfast and summer feeding. Less than 10% participate.
• 69% of U.S public school students in 5-8 grades are being taught math by someone who did not major mathematics in college and is not qualified to be teaching the subject.
• 93% of U.S public school students in grade 5-8 are being taught physical sciences by a teacher without a degree or certificate in physical sciences.
• 7,000 kids a day drop out of school.
• 68% of U.S. state prison inmates are high school dropouts.
In October, Fayetteville based Champions for Kids hosted its first Global Leadership Council in Springdale, Ark. The conference was a collective conversation about how to accelerate the efforts already in place to improve the lives of children in America. The room was full of teachers, administrators, non-profits, and big corporations with big hearts – all focused on at least one aspect of how we are failing our children.
“Now is the time when we wipe the tears from the faces of children whose name we may never know,” says Adelaide Schaeffer. “We welcome a collective conversation about how to unite our energies, how to take our work and accelerate it to another level of impact. Together we imagine the powerful possibilities of change and hope.”
“In many cases it’s not a matter of not knowing what the solution is,” claims Billy Shore, founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, the nation’s leading organization working to end childhood hunger in America.
“In many cases we actually have the solution, but what we haven’t figured out is how to make the solutions affordable, sustainable, and scalable. Kids are not hungry because we lack food as a nation. This country has an enormous abundance of food. They are not hungry because we lack food and nutrition programs. We have programs that have had bipartisan support for 25 or 30 years. Kids who are hungry are hungry because they lack access.”
According to Margaret McKenna, president of the Walmart Foundation, individuals, foundations and corporations spend billions of dollars in philanthropic efforts every year. The Walmart Foundation spent $600 million and cash and in kind last year alone. There are 200 million non-profits registered in the U.S., and 300 new non-profits are created every day.
“Philanthropy needs to be more strategic,” she says. “There’s plenty of money. We have to think about impact. We need to think about capacity building. We need to think about the fishing rod, not just the fish.”
“The big idea here is that we need a shift in national identity,” reports Dr. Ronald Ferguson. Among many things, Dr. Ferguson is the director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, an effort focused on academic research, public education, and innovative outreach activities aimed at eliminating achievement gaps.
“We have a shifting national composition of our population. Not too long from now we are going to be a majority non-white nation. Our national identity remains one that says, ‘we’re the best nation in the world, we’re the leader’. We’re not the leaders anymore. We have a lot of work to do to sustain our status in the world.
“The strategy is to mobilize as many folks as possible in a collective search for how to become the nation we need to become in order to have the future that we’d like to have.
One of the most important resources we have is the people, one another, the friendship ties, trust, social capital, and the shared understandings about who we want to be as a nation.”
Our lack of best practices is an issue of national security, says David Gergen.
“We have had the luxury of growing up in the best nation on Earth, the most powerful nation on Earth, but we are no longer seen by much of the world as the future. Increasingly, the rest of the world thinks that Asia is the future, that China is the future, that they’re coming on to the stage and we’re leaving the stage. They see us as a nation in decline, a nation that can’t come to grips with the central problems that we face as a people.”
Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and director of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. We know him also as the man who wrote President Nixon’s resignation letter, a story he shared on stage with Senator David Pryor’s nudging.
He flew to Northwest Arkansas for the day with the rest of the Boston-based speakers at the behest of Adelaide Schaffer. “What unites us all and brought us here is this luminous woman, Adelaide Schaffer. I’ve never been to Bentonville and I’ve always looked forward to that. I’ve always heard about Walmart and this ring of suppliers.
“But I want to tell you, Adelaide is a one-woman supplier of human talent. She is someone who mobilizes others in pursuit of common good. It’s also true that this is a community of concerned, socially responsible corporations.”
Says Schaeffer, “We work for a time when our shelters are empty. We work for a time in America when there is no achievement gap. We work for a time when hunger is no more. We work for a time in America when our streets are silent, when cities become spaces of hope and healing. We work for a time, today, when all children have someone who cares.
