Beloved,
In May, we pause to observe National Foster Care Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, and National Teacher Appreciation Week. Together, these bring into focus the systems, conditions, and communities that shape family stability and children’s well-being in the nation.
More than 360,000 children and youth currently live in foster carein the United States, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Center. This number underscores both the scale of child welfare system involvement and the urgency of preventing unnecessary family separation. CDF’s teams leverage and amplify KIDS COUNT data to expose these challenges and advance systems that better reflect the needs of our children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that approximately 1 in 5 children ages 3 to 17 experiences a mental, emotional, or behavioral health condition every year. For too many children, these challenges are shaped not only by access to care but by exposure to violence and instability in their homes.
In recent weeks, we have seen devastating reminders of this reality, including the killing of children in a domestic shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the loss of both parents in a murder-suicide in Annandale, Virginia. These are not isolated tragedies. They reflect the intersection of unmet mental health needs, instability, and violence in places where children should always feel safe.
Alongside loving family members and neighbors, educators serve as steady anchors within systems that remain stretched, uneven, and under-resourced.
Taken together, these realities reflect a challenging pattern: systems that too often intervene only after children are in crisis. The urgency is clear. We must build communities of care that meet children’s needs before harm occurs and make these systems irrelevant—as they are (already) antiquated. These outcomes are predictable from systems that define symptoms of poverty as neglect and police families for separation at least as much as they provide support to keep them together.
Your children deserve better. Together, we must build the country our children deserve through action to build power and policies that care for communities. I reflected on this in a keynote with national leaders recently at the Common Sense Summit for Kids in San Francisco.
Young people are too often absent from policy deliberations, even when they are most affected by them. CDF is grounded in the charge shared by our elders to “put the baby in the center of the table” when discussing public policy. When they are missing, harm is predictable, measurable, and disproportionately borne by our greatest treasure. When they are present, communities craft the conditions for everyone to thrive.
What children face in classrooms, clinics, and communities is shaped by policies that create those environments. So, child advocates, parents, educators, caregivers, and faith leaders must work together to inform and advance child-centered public policy. Our work is built around that reality.
While the month of May brings opportunities for awareness, the call from reflection is to collective action. As students celebrate school transitions into the summer, we invite you and all our partners to join us in action to craft loving communities. From our National Day of Social Action, to CDF’s Hall-Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry, to Celebrations of Joy hosted by our state offices across the country, please find your place in this work.
Let’s build.
For our children,
Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson
President and CEO