The Children’s Defense Fund was something mentioned frequently by Hilary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential Campaign, where she was a former staff attorney during her postgraduate study. The Children’s Defense Fund’s mission as quoted on the website is to “ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.” The Children’s Defense Fund has created numerous campaigns to fulfill not only the mission, but policy priorities.
Policy priorities of the Children’s Defense Fund include: Ending child poverty, ensuring that every child has access to health care, providing quality early childhood experiences, ensuring that every child can read at grade level, protecting children from abuse and neglect and stopping the criminalization of children.
The Children’s Defense Fund has completed steps to reach their goals through previous campaigns. In 2015 the campaign Protect Children, Not Guns focused on gun violence and how it is effecting children. Along with the campaign came a fact sheet that states “A Child or teen dies from a gun every three hours and 28 minutes,” and that “The US has as many guns as people,” along with other facts.
In the summer of 2016 the campaign, Road To Freedom was organized. This campaign was for the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools Program, based on literacy, leadership and self advocacy. By supporting this campaign donators would have been supporting books to create their own home “library” for reading, mentors to help them navigate life’s struggles, critical summer and after school reading programs to promote literacy and meals to nourish body and soul. This campaign was completed on July 31, 2016.
There are many ways you can become involved with the Children’s Defense Fund without actually donating. There are options of speaking up for policy priorities by sharing statistics and facts on social media, volunteering or interning. To learn more about the Children’s Defense Fund click here. The Children’s Defense Fund was not something Hilary Clinton just discussed to gain brownie points with potential voters, but a non-profit child advocacy program that works everyday to make life better for children.
