Child Watch™ Visitation Program

How the story begins...

The idea for the Child Watch™ Visitation Program came in 1967 before the Children's Defense Fund began. At the time, Marian Wright (later to become Marian Wright Edelman, founder & president of CDF) was working as a legal advocate for poor people in rural Mississippi. Mechanization in the cotton industry during the mid-1960s had thrown hundreds of thousands of poor Blacks out of work. Senator Robert Kennedy had heard that there were people living in the Lower Mississippi Delta who had no income, and had children who were going to bed hungry each night, with little or no food to eat. Senator Kennedy called upon Ms. Wright to testify at a hearing before the Senate's Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty.

"People are starving," she told members of the subcommittee. "They are starving and those that get the bus fare to go north are trying to go north. There is absolutely nothing for them to do here. There is nowhere to go, and somebody must begin to respond to them. I wish the Senators would have a chance to go around and just look at the empty cupboards in the Delta and the number of people who are going around begging just to feed their children."

Three days later, Marian Wright led Senators Kennedy and Clark on that tour of the Mississippi Delta. She took them into shacks without water or light or heat, and introduced them to families whose children were obviously hungry and often sick. In one of those shacks, Senator Kennedy had an epiphany. There was a baby sitting on the mud floor looking filthy, with a swollen, bloated belly. Senator Kennedy sat there on the floor and tried to get a response from the clearly emaciated baby, but he couldn't. He was visibly moved and disturbed.

After this experience, Senators Kennedy and Clark returned to Washington and went immediately to see the Secretary of Agriculture to talk to him about the Food Stamp Program. They told him what they had seen and insisted that something had to be done at once to relieve hunger in America. The way that the food stamp system was set up at that time, you had to purchase food stamps; therefore if you had no income, you had no money to buy food stamps. That discussion was the beginning of sweeping changes in the federal Food Stamp Program. And it all began with a Child Watch.

Look into the eyes of children
Feel through their eyes the threatening, hope-draining world around them
Imagine the pain of a hungry stomach, an untreated ear infection,
Or the discomfort and shame of sleeping every night in the back seat
Of a cold car or in a noisy and dangerous shelter
Let what you see disturb you
Let it disturb you so much that it prompts you to act
- Marian Wright Edelman

In the early 1980s in response to Ronald Reagan's first budget, the Child Watch™ Program was developed as a program of the Children's Defense Fund to document the local impact of federal budget cuts on children and families across the country. The Association of Junior Leagues International (AJLI) joined CDF as a national collaborator and developed a handbook covering child welfare issues for use at the grassroots level. The program was officially launched at the 1982 CDF Conference in Washington, DC. Fifty community leaders from around the country were trained about data, dissemination, and community awareness and education campaigns. At this point, Child Watch was seen as CDF's first real venture into local programs and collaborations, complementing CDF's approach to issues at the national level.

In the mid-1980s in response to the increasing number of babies being born to teenage mothers, the Child Watch program was redesigned to focus on adolescent pregnancy prevention. Along with documenting and reporting on the extent of adolescent pregnancy in 29 states and the District of Columbia, the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention campaign also included the formulation of recommendations and the establishment of action coalitions. To supplement the efforts of local Child Watch programs, The March of Dimes, the Coalition of 100 Black Women, and National Council of Negro Women joined the Association of Junior Leagues International as national collaborators of the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Child Watch.

In 1989 with almost ten years of successful programming under its belt, CDF began to seek support to expand the Child Watch program through a small planning grant ($10,000) from the Foundation for Child Development. With this funding, an official "visitation" program was developed, modeled after the Community Leadership Course developed by the Committee for the Children of New York. A pilot Child Watch training course was developed for Washington, D.C., area leaders and launched nationally in 1991. A cross-section of typical communities was used to help identify perspective national collaborators, which now include: Kiwanis International, United Methodist Women, Association of Junior Leagues International (AJLI), National Council of Negro Women, American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and National Council of LaRaza.

The national collaborators effort was instrumental in securing volunteers on the local level who were trained and able to implement well-planned Child Watch Visitation Campaigns in cooperation with CDF's national office in Washington, D.C. The success of this effort provided the impetus for the localized training program, which brought Child Watch staff to hundreds of communities around the country to train local coalitions. This resulted in unprecedented growth for Child Watch Coalitions, which grew to more than 350 coalitions around the country.

With the launch of the Act to Leave No Child Behind, Child Watch again has become one of CDF's primary tools for working at the grassroots level to support the larger Leave No Child Behind® Movement. Considering the recent change in federal policy that appears to have little regard for the needs and challenges of poor children in America, the need for Child Watch has become even more immediate. It is crucial that Child Watch bring to life the reality behind the statistics, illustrating the often devastating effects of a nation that refuses to ensure that all children are given a Head Start, a Healthy Start, a Fair Start, and a Safe Start in life.

"Earlier today, as we started this tour, someone called us the 'movers and shakers of the religious community.' After this experience, we are the moved and the shaken."

Those powerful words were spoken by Archbishop John Roach after his participation in a Child Watch Visitation Program in Minneapolis, Minnesota. All over the country, community leaders like Archbishop Roach are being shaken up by the things they see and hear, and by the children and families they meet through the Child Watch program.

The Act to Leave No Child Behind

For over a year, CDF consulted experts in a wide range of areas to assess the national need and climate for a major children's agenda. The Act to Leave No Child Behind (S. 448 / H.R. 936), introduced by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA), combines the best ideas and proposals into a single, comprehensive measure with specific policy objectives (in 12 titles) that aim to improve the lives of children. Although many provisions of the Act are focused upon the most vulnerable, a number of sections would benefit all children, regardless of economic status. Many of these provisions already have been introduced in Congress with bipartisan support. The campaign also is assisted by a bold, sustained and inspirational communications plan to raise public awareness and create a climate that will encourage action by policy-makers.

The Act gives the President, Congress, and all Americans the opportunity to:

*Ensure every child and their parents health insurance;
*Lift every child from poverty-half by 2004, all by 2010;
*End child hunger through the expansion of food programs;
*Get every child ready for school through full funding of quality Head Start, child care and preschool programs;
*Make sure every child can read by fourth grade and can graduate from school able to succeed at work and at life;
*Provide every child safe, quality, after-school and summer programs so they can learn, serve, work and stay out of trouble;
*Ensure every child a place called "home" and decent affordable housing;
*Protect all children from neglect, abuse and violence and ensure them the care they need; and
*Give families leaving welfare the supports needed to be successful in the workplace, including health care, child care and transportation.

The Act to Leave No Child Behind

Highlights