Honoring Mother’s Day
By Marian Wright Edelman
Mothers. Grandmothers. Women.
We have so much work to do.
So many mothers and infant lives to save.
So many child dreams to realize and hopes to nourish and protect.
Our countries and a common world to change and such long distances to travel—from waging war to waging peace; from sickness and death to health; from doubt to faith in Creator’s feminine spirit within
Let some of us—you and I—begin this minute on that journey
To speak for those unable to speak for themselves
To stand with those who cannot stand alone
To gather family and friends to stand with us.
Let us begin this day singing a new song for all our mothers and sisters and brothers and fathers and children around our world who are our own.
For mothers and for all those with a mothering spirit, there is so much work to do. Mother’s Day is often a time when families show appreciation by encouraging mothers to “rest,” maybe beginning with that lovingly homemade card and breakfast in bed. But many mothers know well that even at those rare times when our hands are still, our creative minds and hearts are never fully at rest, whether filled at any moment with worries, dreams, plans, or prayers.
On this Mother’s Day weekend I share again special prayers for all mothers and all those who are tirelessly sowing seeds of life and hope for the future.
**
A new baby is born
A new gift of life
A new gift of love
A new gift of joy
A new gift of hope
Make us good stewards of Your faith in the future.
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Dear God, I thank You for the gift of this child to raise, this life to share, this mind to help mold, this body to nurture, and this spirit to enrich.
Let me never betray this child’s trust, dampen this child’s hope, or discourage this child’s dreams.
Help me dear God to help this precious child become all You mean him to be.
Let Your grace and love fall on him like gentle breezes and give him inner strength and peace and patience for the journey ahead.
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God, help me to weave a tapestry of love and not hate in my children, a spirit of tolerance and caring, and a dedication to freedom for all and not just some. God, help me to sow seeds of peace and justice in my children’s hearts today.
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Thank you, God, for Your never-ceasing love and inexhaustible well of hope through the gift of children.
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Oh God, help us to be worthy of the children You have entrusted to our care.
By Marian Wright Edelman
“Teaching children may be the highest way to seek God. It is, however, also the most daunting way, in the sense of the greatest responsibility.”
–Gabriela Mistral, Chilean Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, school leader, and teacher
Every year, the first full week of May is a chance to show special gratitude and thanks to America’s teachers. This year Teacher Appreciation Week comes at a moment when the nation’s Department of Education itself is under attack. Children’s Defense Fund recently noted that if the Department of Education were to close:
“Students attending roughly 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools in 18,200 school districts would face unnecessary negative consequences.
“More than 12 million post-secondary students who depend on its grants, loans, and work-study assistance would be negatively impacted.
“Title I funds for schools serving children experiencing poverty by supporting 180,300 teaching positions for more than 2.8 million students would be threatened.
“Historically marginalized students, including those who are Black and Brown, living with disabilities, transgender, nonbinary, and immigrant students will lack necessary civil rights protections.”
Now more than ever is a time to thank the teachers who are supporting children and young people every day despite all headwinds and who are making a difference.
Being the kind of educator who consistently nurtures, respects, and inspires the students in their care remains a special calling, and we all owe an immense debt of gratitude to every professional who answers this call. We know teachers are not sufficiently valued in our society if we measure their worth by money—yet after parents, teachers are probably the greatest influencers and molders of children’s and young people’s futures. I have written before about my own teachers who joined parents and other community members in weaving a seamless safety net of caring for children, and provided buffers of love and encouragement that helped combat the negative influences of segregated small-town southern life. They were role models who didn’t equate book smarts with common sense or goodness, but always stressed the importance of education as a means to help improve the lives of others and leave your community and world better than you found it. They were also dedicated to working with children and young adults to set high standards and made clear their own belief that every student could achieve at high levels. All young people need adults who believe in them and expect them to achieve, who love them, and whom they love so much that they live up to their expectations of success.
The Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schoolsâ program is especially proud that so many of the college-aged Servant Leader Interns (SLIs) who are trained to teach at CDF Freedom Schools sites every summer go on to pursue careers in education and become these teachers and mentors for the next generation. Thirty years ago the indomitable Dr. Maya Angelou spoke at the graduation of our first small class of CDF Freedom Schools servant leaders. She engulfed us with her passion and confidence in them: “Let me tell you who you are. You are the rainbow in the clouds for people whose faces you have not seen yet, whose names you don’t know yet, whose histories you haven’t been told yet. And you are, each one of you, individually, privately, each one of you is a rainbow chosen to be in the clouds for somebody.”
Every teacher has the unique opportunity to be that rainbow of hope for their students. Children and young people need adults who never give up on them, are constantly searching for their special gifts, and who refuse to let them fail. The best teachers do this every day. Teacher Appreciation Week is once again a special opportunity to thank all who are already doing their part to transform young people’s chances and our nation’s future by mentoring, challenging, nurturing, and inspiring the students in their care right now.
By Marian Wright Edelman
This month marked a Civil Rights Movement anniversary: the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. People often forget that children and young people were major frontline soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges in New Orleans, the Little Rock Nine at Central High School in Arkansas, and other Black students desegregated schools across the South, often standing up to howling mobs. Many, including Bridges (who later became a Children’s Defense Fund colleague), continue to write books and speak at schools and college campuses across the country sharing their experiences with young people, helping students today understand that none of this is ancient history in our country’s story. After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham in April 1963, young people responded with the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in May. More than 1,000 students walked out from local schools to march, withstanding fire hoses and police dogs to challenge Bull Connor’s brutal rule and topple segregation in that city. College-aged young people coordinated voter registration drives, participated in Freedom Rides testing segregation laws on interstate buses, conducted voter education and Freedom Schools during 1964’s Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and more. They faced pervasive risks of arrest, injury, or death. My generation was blessed beyond measure to be in the right places at the right times to experience and help bring transforming change to the South and to America, and SNCC was one conduit.
The path to its founding began two months earlier, in February 1960, when four Black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University—Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—sat in at the Whites-only lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store. That was just the spark I and many other Black youths were waiting for that galvanized us to stand up against the segregation that daily assaulted our dignity and lives with similar actions. At first there was no mechanism in place to connect us all. But the visionary Ella Baker, who was working with Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organized an April meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., to bring student activists together. I was a senior at Spelman College in Atlanta at the time, and took my first ever plane ride that Easter weekend on a plane chartered by SCLC to join with about 200 other college students for the April 15 convening where SNCC was founded.
From the beginning Ella Baker insisted that students find their own voice and form our own organization instead of becoming the youth arm of SCLC or an established civil rights group. She became a trusted SNCC advisor and mentor, and she and some of the other adults who became colleagues with young people in SNCC and nurtured us were some of the most extraordinary people in the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the student activism energized the larger movement. Many of the student leaders from that time continued to build on the passion and commitment unleashed as teenagers and twenty-year-olds and dedicated their entire adult lives to advocacy and service. While SNCC lasted only six years, SNCC alumni carried on, following up on the ideals we believed in and doing our part to make a better world for the next generations.
That legacy still matters today. All of the children and young people who were part of the Civil Rights Movement are a reminder, as Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® scholars know, that you are never too young to make a difference in your nation and world.
By Marian Wright Edelman
In 2020, when the start of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a holy season like no other, Pope Francis published an Easter Sunday letter directed to movements and organizations working for justice for people with low incomes and those experiencing poverty. He praised them as “an army whose only weapons are solidarity, hope, and community spirit, all revitalizing at a time when no one can save themselves alone…You are looked upon with suspicion when through community organization you try to move beyond philanthropy or when, instead of resigning and hoping to catch some crumbs that fall from the table of economic power, you claim your rights. You often feel rage and powerlessness at the sight of persistent inequalities and when any excuse at all is sufficient for maintaining those privileges. Nevertheless, you do not resign yourselves to complaining: you roll up your sleeves and keep working for your families, your communities, and the common good.” He added: “I hope that this time of danger will free us from operating on automatic pilot, shake our sleepy consciences and allow a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money and places human life and dignity at the centre. Our civilization — so competitive, so individualistic, with its frenetic rhythms of production and consumption, its extravagant luxuries, its disproportionate profits for just a few — needs to downshift, take stock, and renew itself.”
That was one call for renewal at a moment when many others were demanding to “reopen business as usual” and desperate to “get back to normal,” even if business as usual and normal included the exact same structures, systems, and massive inequalities that were already in place. There was a missed opportunity to go far beyond the status quo that preceded the pandemic and reimagine a new vision. The call for true renewal still stands.
The Passover and Easter holidays are seasons of joyous sacred celebration in their faith traditions, with family and community rituals centered on the promises of exodus, deliverance, new hope, and rebirth. I offer again prayers for strength for all those working today towards a time of true renewal.
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Lord, let us exile defeat
wrestle despair to the floor
throw apathy to the winds
and feed depression to the hogs.
Lord, help us to stand up and fight for our children.
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God, protect us and keep us from being
Hypocrites
Experts
Attention huggers
Blamers and complainers
Snake oil salespeople
Takers and just talkers
Lone Rangers
Excuse makers
Fair weather workers
Braggers
Magic bullet seekers and sellers and
Quitters.
God, send us and help us to be
Righteous warriors
Moral guerrillas
Scut workers
Nitty-gritty doers
Detail tenders
Long-distance runners
Energetic tryers
Risk takers
Sharers
Team players
Organizers and mobilizers and
Servant leaders,
to save our children.
**
God, please send the right partners for children and young people and the right coworkers for people in poverty to balance those who speak for powerful adults and interest groups.
God, please send new voices for goodness and tolerance to challenge those who teach our children to hate and who prey on our racial, gender, and class fears.
God, please bring justice for all of our children who are equally sacred in Your sight.
Monday: North Texas Families to Discuss Impact of Potential Medicaid, SNAP Cuts on Children
In July 2024, more than 485,000 children in Dallas & Tarrant Counties relied on Medicaid for their health care, according to Texas Health and Human Services data. These children could face serious consequences if Capitol Hill cuts Medicaid.
Media Contact: John Henry, jhenry@childrensdefense.org, Media Relations Manager, 708-646-7679
DALLAS, TX— On Monday, North Texas families will gather at Friendship-West Baptist Church to discuss how potential cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could impact the region’s children.
The event, A Moral Call to Action to Protect People’s Access, is organized by Children’s Defense Fund-Texas, Friendship-West Baptist Church, Every Texan, and Texas Organizing Protect (TOP). Attendees will have the opportunity to share personal stories about how federal programs like Medicaid and SNAP have supported their families. Additionally, they will learn how to contact their elected representatives to express support for these essential programs and explore opportunities to engage in future advocacy efforts.
The event comes as federal lawmakers in Washington, D.C., debate a proposal to cut the federal budget by $880 billion. Some lawmakers hold concerns the measure could lead to a reduction in Medicaid and SNAP services. House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, addressed the issue on CBS News’ Face the Nation, two weeks ago, stating, “If we don’t make these changes, this program and the federal budget in general is not sustainable,” when asked whether Medicaid recipients might experience changes in how they access the program due to budget cuts.
CDF-Texas maintains if federal lawmakers follow through with cuts to Medicaid, it could pose severe consequences for the more than 485,000 children who rely on the service in Dallas and Tarrant counties, alone, according to the most recent data available from the Texas Health and Human Services Department. SNAP is a crucial anti-hunger tool in Texas too. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says more than 3.1 million Texans, or 1 in every 10 state residents, rely on the service.
As CDF-Texas State Director Dr. Brandy Taylor Dédé highlighted in an op-ed on Medicaid published in the Dallas Morning News earlier this year, the impact of these services on families in North Texas and across the state cannot be overstated.
“These programs represent a lifeline to so many families in North Texas,” she said. “Without swift action, countless children, seniors, and people with disabilities could lose access to the care and support they depend on. We invite families to join us for this important community event, which will provide vital information on how we work to stop these cuts from happening. Together, we can affect change and ensure our elected officials hear our concerns.”
Rev. Danielle Ayers serves as Pastor of Justice at Friendship-West. She said Monday’s event comes at a critical time.
“In a time where human rights and social safety nets are being eliminated or experiencing significantly less funding, faith communities must advocate for just public policy that protects critical social safety nets for the most vulnerable,” she said. “Medicaid and SNAP are essential services for many Americans and Texans. Women and children are the most vulnerable and feel the negative impact when programs are cut. We must continue to amplify the voices of those impacted and engage our elected officials.”
By Marian Wright Edelman
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
This passage is from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination. In his speech in Memphis the night before his murder, Dr. King repeated the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan who stopped and helped the desperate traveler who had been beaten, robbed, and left half dead as he journeyed along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The Good Samaritan is traditionally considered a model of charity for his willingness to treat a stranger as a neighbor and friend. Dr. King agreed that we are all called to follow his example and serve those around us who need help. But he reminded us that true compassion—true justice—requires also attacking the forces that leave others in need in the first place.
If travelers are being assaulted on the Jericho Road, we should help bind their wounds, but also work to make the road a safe passageway. If our communities have neighbors in need and we volunteer at shelters or donate to food pantries and think we’ve done our part, we are only partially right. We have done an important part. But we are not finished if we are not also fighting to prevent and eliminate the violence of joblessness, poor education, poverty, and hunger and the inequalities and injustices that feed and accompany them and unjust systems that create them. With true structural change there would be far less need for charity; without it the very best charitable efforts will never be enough.
Dr. King, our great 20th century American prophet, understood this—yet like so many other prophets, his voice was often at odds with leaders or conveniently left unheard by the people in his own land. During Dr. King’s lifetime, President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty attempted to address some of the inequalities in the United States that needed redressing and restructuring, but that vision was not permanent. By August 1968, Richard Nixon accepted his party’s presidential nomination already criticizing President Johnson’s anti-poverty tactics, and suggesting instead: “Let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man—American private enterprise. Let us enlist in this great cause the millions of Americans in volunteer organizations who will bring a dedication to this task that no amount of money can ever buy.” Instead of worrying about restructuring the edifice that had produced America’s beggars, he believed giving the edifice more power would help; instead of worrying about transforming the Jericho Road, he recommended relying on millions more Good Samaritans. The same threads have been remixed and repeated again and again, alongside the arguments that the safety net is actually a snare, ripe for shredding.
Our nation is now at a moment when even acknowledging that inequities exist in the edifice is under attack. Will Americans embrace attempts to hide and accept the deep unjust structural inequalities and injustices that favor the powerful at the expense of the powerless, the rich at the expense of the poor, and the greedy at the expense of the needy—or return to the call to transform the road?
By Marian Wright Edelman
The night before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his prophetic final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a speech he almost didn’t give. He had returned to Memphis on the morning of April 3, 1968, to continue his support of the city’s striking Black sanitation workers, but as the day went on he was exhausted and running a fever and the weather was stormy. There were fears the storm warnings would also affect the crowd turnout at the mass meeting planned that night at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, and Dr. King initially asked Rev. Ralph Abernathy to speak in his place. But when Rev. Abernathy saw the hundreds of people and the press contingent who had arrived, he called Dr. King at the Lorraine Motel and encouraged him to change his mind.
As Dr. King took the podium, he began that extraordinary speech by telling the crowd that if he had been given the divine opportunity to stand at the beginning of the world with a view of the panorama of human history and choose his time to be alive, after sweeping through all of the grand possibilities, from ancient Greece and Rome to the Renaissance to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, he would have chosen to live even “just a few years” at that very moment.
Dr. King said: “Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.”
We are in such a moment now. Yet when it is dark enough, we can still see the stars. How are women, men, and young people responding today?
Just three days before the Memphis speech, Dr. King was in the nation’s capital for the last time to deliver the March 31 sermon at the National Cathedral. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” was a title Dr. King took from the old story of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for twenty years and slept right through the American Revolution, and whenever he retold that story Dr. King used it as a warning that during upheaval in our own times we must not do the same. In that last Sunday sermon he refuted one more time the “myth” that patience and time would ultimately solve the problem of injustice. Once again, as we honor and remember Dr. King today, listen to his words:
“I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
Media Contact: Dr. John Stanford, State Director, Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, jstanford@childrensdfense.org, 740-914-902
Health experts and youth experts are concerned cuts to Medicaid would jeopardize the well-being of hundreds of thousands of children in Ohio. In 2023, approximately 1.4 million Ohio children were enrolled in Medicaid, according to KIDS COUNT Ohio.
COLUMBUS, OH — On Monday, health experts and youth advocates will address members of the Ohio General Assembly and Ohio Legislative Children’s Caucus to inform them of Medicaid’s impact on children and young people in the state. The hearing comes as members of the Ohio General Assembly and Congress consider changes to state and federal Medicaid programs respectively.
At the virtual meeting, CDF-Ohio Research Manager Dr. Guillermo Bervejillo will present the latest Medicaid enrollment data for young people from the CDF-Ohio KIDS COUNT 2025 data report. Policy Matters Ohio Budget and Health Researcher Kathryn Poe will provide her research on the potential impact of funding cuts to the state’s Medicaid program. Finally, Elisabeth Wright Burak, a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, will give an update on where Medicaid proposals stand in Congress and what they could mean for Ohio children and families.
Medicaid provides a lifeline to 1.4 million of Ohio’s children, according to CDF-OH’s KIDS COUNT 2025 report. The data also highlights the shared experience of children and young people across Ohio, from its largest cities to its Appalachian communities, as children in both settings receive comparable levels of Medicaid support:
- 59.7% of children in Ohio’s Appalachian region
- 60.1% of children in Ohio’s metropolitan areas
| What: | Ohio Legislative Children’s Caucus Meeting: Medicaid: The State of Ohio’s Children |
| When: | 2:30 p.m., Monday, March 31, 2025 |
| Who: | Dr. Guillermo Bervejillo, Research Manager, Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio Kathryn Poe, Budget and Health Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio Elisabeth Wright Burak, Senior Fellow, Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families |
| Where: | This meeting will be via Zoom. Please click here to register. If you have any questions or troubles with the link, contact Dr. Stanford. |
Video recording will be made available for media upon request.
By Marian Wright Edelman
As Women’s History Month draws to a close, there’s been one more broad attack on methods of sharing our nation’s history: on March 27, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order affecting the 21 museums and 14 education and research centers that are part of the Smithsonian Institution, including the American Women’s History Museum, which is still years away from breaking ground on its official site, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Zoo. According to the order, the Smithsonian Institution is “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” which falls under a larger “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
The order says, “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” and assigns Vice President JD Vance to work with Congress to deny funding for exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values” and “divide Americans based on race.” Another piece of the order seeks to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology” and “take action to reinstate” them, allowing tributes to White supremacist Confederate generals and others that were removed in the last five years to be brought back to former positions of glory.
Five years ago on the same date, March 27, our nation lost the “Dean of the Civil Rights Movement,” Rev. Joseph Lowery. When Joe was about 11 years old in 1930s Alabama, a policeman hit him in the stomach with a bully stick for being in a White man’s way. He responded by trying to run home to get his father’s gun. His father stopped him from retaliating that day, but Joe made it his mission to fight back against injustice when he grew up, and he remained a courageous warrior for justice all of his life. Rev. Lowery was a constant companion to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the march from Selma to Montgomery, and a cofounder and later long-term president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He fought against apartheid in South Africa and for LGBTQ rights and marriage equality at home. And many Americans remember his moving benediction at the end of President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and his prayer for our nation that day.
Rev. Lowery began by quoting from the final verse of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”: “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way, Thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray…” He continued by acknowledging a moment of national and global financial uncertainty: “Because we know You’ve got the whole world in Your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills. For we know that, Lord, You are able, and You’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.”
He asked forgiveness for sowing “seeds of greed and corruption” that led to reaping “the whirlwind of social and economic disruption,” and prayed that Americans would be willing “to make sacrifices, to respect Your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.” And he prayed: “Help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek Your will…We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know You will not leave us alone. With Your hands of power and Your heart of love, help us then now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nations; when tanks will be beaten into tractors; when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”
Some Americans might see that prayer today as degrading or divisive, yet many others might still say: amen.
CDF-New York, 90+ Partner Organizations Sign Letter in Support of Youth Justice Innovation Fund: ‘Proposal would help to build up critical community resources’ in State Budget
The Innovation Fund builds on evidence showing that linking youth with community-based services reduces criminal legal system contact and promotes community safety.
Media Contact: John Henry, jhenry@childrensdefense.org, CDF Media Relations Manager, 708-646-7679
NEW YORK, NY—Children’s Defense Fund-New York joined 97 partner organizations in signing a letter voicing their support for legislation that would establish the Youth Justice Innovation Fund in the New York state budget this year.
The legislation creating the Youth Justice Innovation Fund, sponsored by Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages and Senator Cordell Cleare (and included in the Senate’s One House budget proposal), would direct $50 million to community-based organizations best equipped to provide a continuum of services from prevention and early intervention, to alternatives to detention, placement, and incarceration for young people. The New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services will administer the fund through a statewide grantmaking program.
Read the full letter: Letter of Support – Youth Justice Innovation Fund
The letter, which will be sent to Governor Kathy Hochul, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, notes youth crime has gone down in New York State since the Raise the Age law was first implemented in 2018. While evidence shows the law—which was endorsed by CDF-NY—has improved community safety and youth well-being in the State of New York, officials have yet to fully deliver on its promise to fund the community-based services and programs that it provides as alternatives to incarceration for young people.
The Youth Justice Innovation Fund would take $50 million of the annual $250 million initially appropriated for Raise the Age and dedicate it directly toward funding community-based organizations that provide support for services like mentoring, mental health programs, academic assistance initiatives, and other programs proven to reduce contact with the criminal legal system and future court involvement.
“A recent report from the statewide Alternatives to Incarceration coalition shows that there is currently a significant gap in these kinds of programs. The fund would help to build up these critical community resources that bolster neighborhood safety and support positive youth development,” the letter reads.
CDF-New York and its partners urge the Governor and Legislature to include $50 million for the Youth Justice Innovation Fund in its final enacted budget for Fiscal Year 2026.