The Los Angeles launch and press conference will feature civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, Senator Holly Mitchell, and others. In collaboration with the Dolores Huerta Foundation, we’re proud to announce the primary sponsors for this event are St. John’s Well Child and Family Center and Crystal Stairs.
Join us at 10 a.m. for snacks and welcome. The press conference will start at 10:30 a.m. and will be followed by neighborhood community outreach. This is a free event.
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The End Child Poverty in California campaign is sponsored by GRACE (Gather, Respect, Advocate, Change, Engage) and the End Child Poverty Institute to end extreme child poverty and reduce overall child poverty in California. In close partnership with the Dolores Huerta Foundation, we are working to increase support and community engagement across the state. We invite you to be part of the movement to address the highest child poverty rate in the nation by implementing simple solutions to a complex issue. Read our 2020 priorities.
In January, California legislators got a visit from parents, children, and #EndChildPovertyCA partners who came to Sacramento with a simple message: We have the solutions to end extreme child poverty — now we need the political champions to join our movement.
Parents, children, and partners at the #Together4Kids2020 advocacy event in Sacramento where we sent the message that ALL our kids should be healthy, fed, & housed
In Sacramento, Parent Voices California parent Monique Rosas reminded legislators that California’s child poverty rate isn’t a failure of people — it’s a result of divestment in public systems for communities and families. “Not being able to afford childcare or housing has a lot to do with the broken system, not the people,” she said. “We will continue to fight until our children are housed, fed, and supported in love.”
We have a chance to repair that broken system this year, and support among our elected leaders is growing. The Governor’s budget already includes three of our five legislative priorities for 2020: These are wins you helped achieve! And now, we’re going all in to tell legislators that it’s time to pass all five.
We are so grateful to our partner, the California Alternative Payment Program Association, for organizing #Together4Kids2020, and to dozens of partners like Children Now, California Association of Food Banks, Parent Voices California, Western Center on Law & Poverty, Hayward Promise Neighborhood, Alameda County Community Food Bank, and MORE who showed up with their voices and their signs!
California is the richest place in the nation, with more millionaires and billionaires than any other state. Ending extreme child poverty here isn’t a pipe dream. It’s something we can and will achieve — with the help of our legislators, our partners, and you.
In Solidarity, Jackie Thu-Huong Wong Vice President of Policy and Advocacy End Child Poverty CA
Soon after achieving her dream of owning a hair salon, Jacquelyne Gettone encountered a problem familiar to many parents: She couldn’t find affordable child care that she trusted close to home.
“I had to close my business because I couldn’t afford child care,” she says.
Jacquelyne has now been on California’s subsidized child care waiting list for over a year — and she’s still waiting. “For many families, the waiting list is really the No Hope List,” she says. “It leaves me heartbroken. Eighty-five percent of [children on the waiting list] are children of color. My son Matthew is one of them. The odds are stacking up against him as an African-American boy.”
“Being on the waitlist means spending three to four hours per day commuting, not being able to afford a reliable car, loss of time to spend with my children, having to miss out on my kids’ school and sports activities…It means living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s made me feel hopeless, frustrated, and stressed.” – Jacquelyne Gettone, Parent Voices
Jacquelyne is fighting to create more opportunities for families like hers. She’s a member of Parent Voices, one of our End Child Poverty California partners, and traveled from Contra Costa to Sacramento this spring to share her story with state legislators.
Parent Voices is a parent-led organization dedicated to making quality child care accessible and affordable to all families. They work hard to put the experiences of parents at the center of policy decisions, and provide powerful reminders of what’s at stake in our state: Parents are losing jobs and quitting school because of a lack of child care.
When the voices of parents unite with those of policy makers, partners, and allies like you, big things happen. Together, just this year, we got $5 billion of the End Child Poverty Plan into the state budget, including 12,500 new childcare slots, 10,000 full-day preschool slots, and childcare guarantees without interruption!
Jacquelyne (left) and other Parent Voices parent leaders attending a budget hearing at the Capitol.
I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together with partners like Parent Voices. There’s more work to do to #EndChildPovertyCA, and I look forward to showing up with you — and all our amazing partners — to get even more done in 2020.
Yours,
Jackie Thu-Huong Wong Vice President of Policy and Advocacy End Child Poverty CA
Brian King of the Fresno Street Saints, speaks in Fresno on May 18, 2019, as part of the End Child Poverty Bus Tour. Read Brian’s full speech below. Photo credit: Fernando Rios
Brian King is the director and co-founder of the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission Street Saints. He grew up in poverty on Chicago’s South Side. Brian served as a member of California’s statewide Lifting Children and Families Out of Poverty Task Force that created the End Child Poverty Plan. As our CEO Conway Collis said, “It’s with Brian King’s leadership that we’re going to get this done.”
Brian joined us for the entire 2019 End Child Poverty in California Bus Tour, and spoke multiple times, including this powerful speech in front of his hometown crowd in Fresno.
***
Praise God. I’m appointed to speak to you guys first about
what I’m experiencing. So first without any further ado, let me give thanks to
God for me even being here. It’s only through Him that I’m here. You know, they
wrote me off and said I would never live to be 15, but it’s only thanks to God
that I’m here a couple ticks away from 60.
Then I want to give thanks to my mother and mothers like her who went to bed hungry so that we couldn’t taste what poverty felt like. And so for the mothers who have put themselves in those positions and continue to do so to this day, I want to salute you guys: mothers who have went without so that we can.
Brian King, director, Fresno EOC Street Saints, May 2019
I want to talk to you on a couple of deals – with two hats –
the first hat is poverty. I am a direct descendent of poverty. I have
experienced all the DNA of poverty. I’ve went from an 8-year-old gang member,
to 14-year-old drug addict, to an incarcerated teenager, to a 21-year-old
homeless addict walking around on the South Side of Chicago just waiting to
die.
I have cleaned up, and went back to the streets and became
one of the most significant and largest drug dealers in the city of Chicago. I
have everything that’s made up of a young African-American male that’s walked
the impoverished community.
But then I came to Fresno and I found a man name Jesus. And now the other hat I wear is a battle against poverty.
And my question to us in Fresno is “How do we feed the world, but starve our kids?”
It is a tragedy that we live in the second highest concentrated poverty area in the nation. And we’re not alone. In our travels, I’ve been able to go through San Diego to here. And what I’ve seen has really broke my spirit. I met a young 26-year-old lady in San Diego named Monique that has all the DNA that I have from these impoverished neighborhoods. But she has a 4-year-old kid that she’s trying to raise on $540 a month.
But she’s fighting.
And she was so excited to see the [End] Childhood Poverty bus come up that she encouraged me to keep on. Because sometimes this deal gets hard. But as we continue to go on, I’ve seen the governor come to a community where the community came around and said, “No more.” We’re going to stand, and we’re going to fight, and we’re going to figure this whole deal out.”
Then we went and met a senator that’s working with a group of ladies that held hands and talked about how we can overcome.
And so as we continue to walk through this path of created suffering—through Pomona and through our travel halfway across this state, I’ve been able to sit an hour with people on the bus and sit in hotels in the evening and just look at the glimmer of hope that we come together to try to end poverty throughout the whole state.
There is a battle ahead of us. But coming from impoverished neighborhoods, we battle every day.
And we know this ain’t nothing but a step. So we’re here today to say, “Fresno, we need you. We need you to go out and use your influence. We need you to begin to go. And those of you who’ve not registered to vote, we need you to go register. We need you guys that sit in City Hall and that sit in these lobbying seats to begin to lobby. We need our elected officials to come together and hold hands with San Diego, with L.A., with Weedpatch.
We were there this morning. And I sat there and I watched a community that had almost nothing, give us their best. They cooked breakfast burritos for us. They had chips for us, water for us, and they don’t even have their own clean drinking water. But they took part, and they took place in this fight that we’re having.
Members of the Fresno EOC Street Saints at the Fresno stop on the End Child Poverty Bus Tour, May 18, 2019.
And so as we begin and continue our journey, I want to first salute you guys for coming out and taking time out your busy days to be a part of this deal. And from our Fresno Street Saints family, I love you guys. Thanks for showing up for us.
We are truly in a time and space in history, that we can right it. And so as you continue to hear the speakers that’s coming up today, I ask that you open your hearts, that you listen, because this is a message that’s coming from across the state – a universal message that we have to begin to save our children. And like all you guys, I am 1,300% with us lifting our children out of poverty.
But again, my biggest concern is our children are dying poverty. So we just ask that you listen patiently, and that you hear that there is a solution, and we want to give you that solution.
***
California has 450,000 children living in deep poverty.
We’re also the only state with a plan to END it. Already in 2019, $3.4 billion
has been put toward the End Child Poverty Plan in the 2019-2020 state budget.
Investments to end child poverty will pay for themselves over time as parents
and children become healthier in body, mind, and spirit, and are able to have
higher lifetime earnings.
There’s more work to do. We have the research, the plan, and
the momentum to end child poverty. Now we need the political and moral courage
to see it through.
This time last year, the Lifting Children Out of Poverty Task Force released California’s first-ever End Child Poverty Plan. For change-makers across the state, “Pass the Plan” became a rallying call to the governor and legislative leaders to make ending extreme child poverty a top priority — and they showed that they cared.
The plan will END extreme child poverty in California and cut overall child poverty in half. It’s bold, and it took a year of teamwork, research, and engagement to produce.
California is the only state with a plan to end extreme child poverty. Together, we’re going to make it a reality.
Watch faith leaders speak at last December’s #PassthePlan release rally:
This is your plan: You helped fight for it by sharing news with your network, showing up in Sacramento and all over the state, and believing in the mission. Because of our hard work together…
The California legislature passed key recommendations from the plan this year.
Almost $5 billion in End Child Poverty Plan investments were adopted in the state budget.
More than 60 organizations and 47,000 Californians have become involved to #EndChildPovertyCA — and more are joining every day.
We are incredibly grateful to you and our community. We’re sharing our gratitude now through the start of 2020, and we want to hear from you.
November 2019 — Our movement to end child poverty in California is entering a critical new phase — and we want you to be a part of it from the start.
End Child Poverty California is partnering with civil rights leader, founder, and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, Dolores Huerta, to build a grassroots army of Californians ready to end child poverty in our state for good.
This is a big moment for our movement — and a huge moment for the future of California kids. Help us mark this milestone by sharing the news with your friends today!
We couldn’t be more proud to partner with a woman who has dedicated her life to showing people the power they have. Dolores Huerta founded the United Farm Workers movement along with César Chávez. She coined the slogan, “¡Sí se puede!” And in 2002, she established the Dolores Huerta Foundation for grassroots community organizing to empower people to fight for the changes they want to see in their communities.
Here’s what Dolores has to say:
“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It’s time for us to come together to end this child poverty crisis that’s destroying our children’s futures. We can do this. ¡Sí se puede!”
We have one big goal: to fully end extreme child poverty within the next four years. Then we’ll keep going to make sure ALL California children have the chance to thrive.
End Child Poverty CA Roundtable in San Bernardino with Dolores Huerta, hosted by Assemblymember Eloise Reyes at Community Action Partnership, with attending organizations including Child Care Resource Center, Golden State Opportunity, San Bernardino County Preschool services, and sisters of the Daughters of Charity
Here’s what we’re asking you to do next: Share about the End Child Poverty CA + Dolores Huerta Foundation partnership. Let your people know what’s going on. We’ll follow up soon to ask you what you’d like your next step in the movement to be.
— End Child Poverty in California (@EndChildPovCA) November 12, 2019
We look forward to working with the Dolores Huerta Foundation to mobilize communities across the state so that all our children have a brighter future and all our families can thrive!
California has 450,000 children living in deep poverty. We’re also the only state with a plan to END it. Californians across the state know that all our children can thrive. Already, almost $5 billion has been put toward the End Child Poverty Plan in the 2019-2020 state budget. Investments to end child poverty will pay for themselves over time as parents and children become healthier in body, mind, and spirit, and are able to break free from poverty.
There’s more work to do. In California, we have the research, the plan, and the momentum to end child poverty. Now we need the political and moral courage to see it through.
