Help Wanted

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

Media Voices for Children has joined First Focus and a coalition of 350 organizations and national leaders in calling upon the Biden administration to establish an Office on Children and Youth in the West Wing.  The letter to the President says the time is now to integrate our efforts across all government agencies to put children’s needs at the center of all of our decision making, budgeting and policies. The pandemic, racial injustice, inequality and the economic downturn have created an urgent moment for America’s children.

“Children’s needs do not fit neatly into one box. Federal policies covering everything from health care to education to hunger and taxes deeply affect our 74 million children. Yet children are often an afterthought with no single entity making sure each agency fulfills its obligation to them.”

Bruce Lesley, President, First Focus

Already, the Biden Presidency has taken transformative actions to benefit children with the 1.9 trillion-dollar CARE ACT. Monies have been designated to expand access to food, to make schools safer with expanded testing and vaccines, to eliminate poverty with cash payments to poor families, for housing, extended unemployment, to expand our mental health care, to help children with a variety of disabilities, both mental and physical. Executive actions have been taken to protect Dreamers, reunite families at the border and re-establish America’s place as a country that welcomes immigrants and protects and honors the International Conventions that respect human rights. Children’s rights are human rights.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

A White House Office on Children and Youth

Government works from the top down. A Cabinet-level position should be created to monitor and coordinate children’s issues and most importantly see that the government does the work on the ground that reflects our attitudes towards children, values them as our future and accepts our special obligation to care for them. The United States, the only country in the world that has failed to ratify The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, needs to act quickly to adopt this Convention, the most ratified single treaty in the history of the UN. It is a global agreement on the special status of children and the precious and passing nature of childhood. It can serve as the baseline we strive for as we move forward in this challenging time.

In 2002, I spent a month in Brazil working to document child labor and human trafficking to prepare a report for the U.S. Congress, the first of its kind. The effort yielded 7000 still images, taken by my partner Robin Romano, and 600 hours of video. We shot dozens of interviews with government and business leaders, but most importantly we filmed interviews with children who had no choice but to work rather than go to school, whose childhoods had been stolen by economic exploitation.

Of all the people who worked on the front lines to help children one in particular stands out and his efforts explain why I feel so strongly about the White House Office On Children and Youth.

Gilberto Dimenstein was a journalist, writer and human rights activist.

He founded ANDI, a news agency for children’s rights. I remember he told me, as we traveled together to his agency’s office in Brasilia, that the object of his efforts was to “put children at the center of every decision made by the government of Brazil, to have children’s needs be a part of the pulse and bloodstream of Brazil.”

ANDI funneled news, programs, initiatives, budget questions, environmental concerns, business and labor initiatives to all of the major press outlets in Brazil. In just 4 years’ time, this approach reduced child labor in Brazil by a remarkable 7 million while attacking illiteracy, poverty, hunger, access to schools and health care and championing cash transfers to families to enable their children to attend school, rather than work.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

Today, ANDI has become a model for putting human rights and children’s needs first, and there are many organizations who fashion themselves in its image. Dimenstein was a model for the kind of leader we need now to lead our federal government’s initiatives for children. With President Biden in the same building and with representation at all Cabinet meetings, children will have a seat at the table at last.