Below are my comments from the Put Kids 1st Awards Luncheon yesterday at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin:
Phil Strickland founded our organization 25 years ago on the premise that success for Texas only makes sense in the context of success for individual Texans. Today Texans Care for Children, through
our 200-plus members and
five monthly coalitions, … brings people together to develop common solutions that further his vision of promoting all aspects of child wellbeing.
His vision seems so timely to me, as our state faces our current set of challenges--a time of crisis for many Texas families, families who will measure success not by what benchmarks leaders say have or have not been met, but, rather, by the personal experiences they are having within their own communities and by the opportunities they see for their children.
During this economic disaster, our state is considering some pretty dire options:
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taking away a program that provides parents of children with special medical needs--who have no options on the private insurance market--the opportunity to buy coverage for their kids;
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cutting programs proven to prevent teen parents from abusing their children;
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reducing the options available to low-income children in need of professional mental health services;
[and]
other equally stark options. Taking more from Texas children during an economic disaster is shortsighted and, if I may say so, unconscionable. We need to work together during this crisis to develop new ways of doing things, new solutions to chronic problems. We need strategies that help Texas families weather the crisis, while also providing us with the groundwork for propelling our state forward during economic recovery.
Let's acknowledge that the impact of the crisis at hand is not about budgets, but about real lives, about real individual potential that we can choose to maximize or squander. Let this not be the moment when we fail Texas families, but rather let this be the moment when we as a state begin answering the call of those families like never before--when we advocates unite, when our leaders take the political risk of pursuing innovation, and we as a state demand of ourselves what we know we are capable of.
Texas children know what we are capable of. At each place setting today [is] artwork and letters from Texas children sharing their concerns, priorities, and depictions of a better tomorrow. I think it a supreme honor and a supreme obligation to be the stewards of these hopes and dreams. If you too feel compelled to safeguard their vision, I hope we can count on your partnership, either by directly
engaging in this work or
supporting those of us who do.
