Marian Wright Edelman

Originally published in “The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center: The First 50 Years” (2009)

In 1990, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), Dr. John Hope Franklin, and Dr. Dorothy Height convened 23 black leaders for five days at Bellagio to discuss the crisis facing black families and children. We concluded that we faced the worst crisis since slavery and committed to launching a Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) to Leave No Child Behind. (It began at Bellagio!) Its mission was and is to raise public awareness about the plight of black and all children; rebuild the bridge between the black poor and the middle class; develop a new generation of servant leaders; reweave the fabric of family and community; rekindle the strong black tradition of self-help; and create new models for advocacy and service to benefit all children, especially minority and poor children.

A follow-up 1992 Bellagio meeting jump-started the Crusade’s action phase, which continues to this day, generating ongoing CDF and partner action. Fruits include Geoff Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone; more than 12,000 young servant leaders trained at the former Alex Haley Farm (our center for interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and interracial discourse, spiritual renewal, and leadership development); 138 summer and afterschool CDF Freedom Schools in 2008, which provide reading enrichment, parent engagement, community service, and citizenship-building skills (and have engaged more than 70,000 children ages 5 to 15 and thousands of college teacher-mentors since 1994); annual celebrations of high school students beating the odds in a number of cities (to date, more than 600 are now lawyers, doctors, teachers, and productive citizens); and annual child gun-violence reports that have contributed to a decrease in child and teen firearm deaths from 16 a day in 1994 to 8 a day in 2005.

Two Bellagio meetings of women leaders from around the globe, in 2005 and 2007, laid the foundation for the Global Women’s Action Network for Children launched at the Dead Sea Conference Center in Jordan under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah. A major public education, mobilization, and advocacy campaign, Viva Mama!, will give voice to the more than seven million mothers and newborns who die each year from pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes (the largest preventable cause of death in the world today, three times that of HIV/AIDS). And an Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Liberian Graduate Fellowship Program is underway to strengthen the capacity of women government leaders in Liberia. 

Developing solutions to complex problems affecting people of color, the poor, and vulnerable women and children across the world requires a haven for safe debate, incubation of ideas, planning of strategic actions, and accountability for monitoring agreed-upon benchmarks. This is what the Bellagio Center has provided, and I am profoundly grateful.