As you know, Hillary Clinton was honored last night at a Kennedy
Center gala celebrating the 40th anniversary of the
Children's Defense Fund. If you were watching the Hillary news feeds, however, you might
have thought the only headlines were about CNN and NBC dropping plans
for movies and documentaries. To honor Hillary, CDF made their own video about her.
Hillary never slows down. She has embarked on
several wonderful initiatives, including
Too Small to Fail,
as she mentions below. Americans and the world do not need scripted movies,
documentary or otherwise, to tell us about her work. We have the real
Hillary herself - her actions and her words.
Here is her tweet from last night’s event followed by transcript of her remarks (thanks to CDF and
Digital Journal), a rare treat since she left DOS!
PR Newswire
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2013
What a great evening! Oh. I tell you, my only regret about tonight
and this remarkable 40th anniversary is that I wish we could have held
it at the Capitol and shared the enthusiasm, the stories, the resolve,
the commitment and mission with those Members of our Congress, so that
they understand why we can never give up. As Marian has said, this is
the work of a lifetime. We’ve made progress. We’ve seen changes. We have
watched the results of these young people who have been on the stage
with us, and we know that that’s what America is really all about, the
kind of values and commitment that we’ve seen.
I am one of the many people whose life was changed by Marian, and I
was very lucky that I tracked her down one day when she was at the law
school we both attended and asked her if I could have a job. She said
she had no jobs because she had no money to pay anybody. I said, “Well,
that’s a problem because I need to make money to go to law school,” and
she said, “Well, if you can figure out how to get yourself paid, I’ll
give you a job.” So I looked everywhere I could possibly look and found a
paid stipend for the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council
internship, and off I went for my first experience working for Marian.
And we’ve heard a lot about the example that Marian has set, the
passion that she brings to her work and inspires in so many of us, but I
want to add that she also really looked at the evidence. She never was
unprepared. She knew that if we were to make a case on behalf of the
children of our country, we had to have our facts straight. We had to
know exactly what was going on in order to be advocates and agents of
change.
One of my first experiences was when Marian intuited by sort of
talking to people and then analyzed Census data and school enrollment
and came to us and said, “I don’t understand it. I mean, there are so
many more children in our country than we have in school who are of
school age. We have to figure out what’s going on.” So I was one of the
many people recruited to go door to door in some select Census districts
and literally knocking on the door and, when someone answered the door,
saying, “Do you have any children in the home who are not in school?”
It was that hard daily work of gathering the facts, and what did I find?
I found some children weren’t in school because they had to work to
help support the family or they had to take care of their siblings, but I
mostly found children with disabilities who in those days were not
really welcome in our schools, children whose families couldn’t afford
the wheelchair or the hearing aid or the other intervention that might
have made it possible for them to attend school, and I was one of many
who reported back the data. And as a result of all the work by so many
of us, the Children’s Defense Fund published its very first report
called “Children Out of School in America.”
And then Marian took the data and used it to convince lawmakers in Washington
that more needed to be done to make sure that all of our children,
including our children with disabilities, have the chance for an
education, and in 1975, Congress passed the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act. And for me, that was transformative.
Marian was equal parts passion and compassion, toughness and
tenderness, and relentless on behalf of children, justice, and progress.
And then in the 1980s, CDF successfully pushed to expand Medicaid
to cover more pregnant women and children under 5 and children with
disabilities. In the 1990s, we worked together to create the State
Children’s Health Insurance Program, to improve the foster care and
adoption systems, to expand Early Head Start, and then after 2000, CDF
kept fighting for kids in foster care, in the juvenile justice system,
in Head Start, working with both Republicans and Democrats, and of
course, the work goes on.
There are dozens of laws on the books of the United States
protecting children and supporting families that would not be there
were it not for the Children’s Defense Fund. And I for one am very happy
that even though now 90 percent of our children have access to health
care, when the Affordable Care Act actually goes into implementation
tomorrow, we will raise that number.
One of the many things that I love about Marian is that no matter
how depressing the headlines, she keeps her eye on the trend lines.
What’s happening with our kids? What can we do to improve the chances
that more kids will be able to achieve educational success? And the
Freedom Schools is a brilliant intervention in children’s lives in
places where for too long, there wasn’t that kind of opportunity to
learn, to collaborate, to think and dream as big as possible.
So although we are celebrating 40 years, which seems like a really
long time, in the history of a country, it’s not that long. It’s just
that our mission is so precious and urgent because, after all, today in
America, more than 16 million children live in poverty, the highest
percentage since the 1990s, and despite all the advances we’ve made, our
babies are still more likely to be born underweight and undernourished
in the last year than they were in 1990. And the prevalence of chronic
health conditions in American children, including obesity, asthma,
behavior and learning problems, and other conditions have more than
doubled in the past two decades. And yes, nearly half of all the
recipients of food stamps are children, 22 million who rely on that
program to get the food they need to be healthy, to be able to pay
attention in school, to thrive for the future.
So why on earth would some want to be tearing down the support structure that keeps our children healthy?
So, yes, there’s a lot of work to be done. I for one am looking
forward to continuing that work, both as a partner with CDF and at the
Clinton Foundation working with my husband and my daughter, trying to
make sure that we all do what we can to help more kids beat the odds,
and I could not be prouder or happier to have sat in the audience and
heard the stories of just a few of the young people, to see the
performances of just a few of the young people whose lives have been
touched, even transformed by the Children’s Defense Fund.
So I know I was sitting next to Marian when we heard that
extraordinary speech from our young City Councilmember in Stockton, and,
you know, I do have an eye for political talent.
So I kind of expect that we’ll be hearing more from him, but he
had this great cadence going about how in the next 40 years, the next 40
years. And Marian is going, “We can’t wait that long.”
Well, we can’t. We can’t. We want the next generation and the
generation after that to have many more opportunities to realize the
American dream, however they define it, to be able to live up to their
own God-given potential, and we want to keep making progress every year,
year by year, to make it clear that every child is our child. And we
will not rest until every single child has the same chance to beat the
odds as the ones you saw tonight.
Thank you and God bless you Marian Edelman.
CONTACT:
Raymonde Charles
Press Secretary
202-662-3508 (office)
rcharles@childrensdefense.org
SOURCE Children’s Defense Fund
Here are a few more twitpics.
Our girl last night.
I
have loved this jacket, which she wears only rarely and exclusively to
evening events, since the first time she wore it to a function during a
NATO summit in April 2009. It looks every bit as lovely on her now as
it did then.
 |
| 2009 NATO Summit |
Hillary's work for children will be further recognized this evening when
Save the Children honors her with their National Legacy Award. Seeing her so honored trumps a movie any day of the week.
Our best congratulations, Mme. Secretary on two such accolades in two days!
Hillary Clinton
