https://www.fcd-us.org/centering-children-serves-the-common-good/
Over this past year, the Foundation for Child Development Board and staff have been exploring what it would mean to be a social justice funder for young children. As we embarked on that journey, we pledged to follow five principles:
- Center children marginalized by racism, xenophobia, and economic inequality.
- Work at the nexus of research, policy, and practice to benefit children.
- Take a clear-eyed view of history and learn from it.
- Navigate our journey through inclusive dialogue.
- Act with respect and care for our relationships.
The Social Justice for Young Children Conversation Series was one of our early forays along that journey. We invited advocates, parent and community organizers, coalition leaders, and researchers to share their wisdom and experience. Here are three themes that emerged.
Centering Children Serves the Common Good
In the last post in our Conversation Series, Regis Pecos placed children’s issues within a multigenerational context, specifically a seven-generation context. Each of us sits in the middle as the fourth generation: we are shaped by our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents and, in turn, our actions will influence our society’s children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
When we center children, we are preparing the future caretakers of our communities and our environment. When we center children, we serve the common good.
Regis also joined a Foundation retreat in June, asking our Board and staff to identify the core values that define who we are and to acknowledge the people who gifted those values to us. My core value is responsibility, and it was gifted to me by my immigrant mother. Like many children of immigrants, I grew up with a strong sense of responsibility to family — to honoring the sacrifices my parents made to provide better lives for my siblings and me. As an adult, my gaze traveled further back to the generations of immigrant, enslaved, and Indigenous people who resisted oppression and created the opportunities that I have been able to enjoy in this country. As my understanding of history expanded, so did my sense of responsibility to today’s communities and tomorrow’s children.
Who are the children who will be the future caretakers of our communities and environment? More than half of today’s children are children of color, and one in four are children of immigrants (Frey, 2021). One in eight live in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). Despite their centrality to our country’s future, they remain marginalized by centuries of racism and colonialism, virulent xenophobia, and persistent economic inequality.
At the Foundation, we hope to shift those children from the margins to the center, to embrace their centrality to the future of our multi-racial and immigrant-rich democracy.
Children, of course, don’t raise themselves, and we believe that centering children means holding their parents and caregivers with respect — honoring their dignity and supporting their collective power. We have been inspired by Mothering Justice’s work to build the power of mothers of color to set policy agendas, mobilize voters, fight disinformation, and run for elected office. We have learned from Community Change’s efforts to support families and providers across the country in fighting for child care that provides affordable, high-quality services for families and living wages and worker protections for their caregivers and teachers. We are encouraged that this organizing work on behalf of children and families is part and parcel of broader movements for economic and racial justice. They are not just children’s issues. They are movement issues.
Movements are Powerful Vehicles for Social Change
Many of the authors in the series emphasized the importance of coalitions that center the experiences of children and families most impacted by injustice. “Sustained success,” Olivia Golden argued on ending child poverty, “demands expertise from all vantage points: lived experience front and center, plus on-the-ground organizing, state advocacy, national advocacy, and policy development.”
Wendy Cervantes and Adriana Cadena wrote of the power of coalitions to protect children of immigrants. The Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) coalition and the Children Thrive Action Network (CTAN) enable those most impacted by xenophobia to shape policy agendas.
In these types of coalitions, advocates are not simply working on behalf of children and families, they are seeking to work in ways that honor what communities want for themselves. This is the difference between paternalism and self-determination in policy advocacy.
As part of their efforts, CTAN spent months in listening sessions with immigrant parents, children, and youth to identify their most pressing concerns, and then channeled the concerns into their advocacy agenda. PIF centered the experiences of immigrant families, as well as organizations working closely with communities, in reimagining its new strategic framework. This led to an increased focus on the capacity-building of member organizations, narrative change strategies, and bold-action policy priorities — all to advance access to public benefits for immigrant families.
Speaking from academia, Manuel Pastor calls on the research community to work in “deep relationship” with community. Too often academics conduct research on communities or in parallel to them, but not in alignment with them. Looking back on a career of community-engaged research, Manuel recounts that “his” most brilliant ideas came from community organizers’ questions. What researchers bring to the table, he writes, are rigorous research methods and data analyses to address communities’ questions and ideas. By doing so, researchers can move their social justice values beyond academic corners and offer them as gifts in solidarity with social justice movements.
And what is a funder’s role vis-a-vis movements? Following a bold decision to spend down foundation assets, Lori Bezahler advocates for philanthropy to uplift the voices of organizers and movement leaders, share power with grantee partners, and expand our willingness to take on risk in the struggle for social justice. Drawing on their work at Sobrato Philanthropies, Robert Medina and Doua Thor suggest that funders support the front-end time for partners to get to know each other, build trust, and assess whether a new coalition is needed or whether existing coalitions just need more or different support. Funders can resource facilitation support: the creation of tools, structures, and agreements for joint decision-making to ensure inclusive and equitable collaboration. They can also support the staff required to carry out that facilitation work.
Let’s Make Sure We’re Focused on the Right Problems
My graduate school mentors in community psychology cautioned against diving into the wrong problems. Too often, we treat symptoms but fail to deal with underlying problems. Or we allow biases, false narratives, and misinformation to frame problems in ways that are dramatically different from how impacted communities see them. Mis-defining problems then leads us astray in seeking solutions. After all, how a problem is defined leads us down the path of certain types of solutions and away from others.
This lesson is reflected in several posts in the series. Ai-jen Poo powerfully argues that early care and education experts and advocates have focused a lot on upgrading the workers and not enough on upgrading their jobs. When we seek to upgrade workers’ skills, training, and credentials, we define their deficits as the problem to be solved. An economic justice lens shines our problem-gaze on poor pay and working conditions and points to policy solutions that “make care jobs good jobs.”
Mariana Souto-Manning similarly critiques a deficit lens on the people — many of them women of color and immigrant women — who work in these professions. Not only are their skills looked down upon, but they are pressed to enact care work in a way that fits White, middle-class ways of talking and behaving. Mariana shifts our problem-gaze away from what’s lacking in care workers. She pivots our solution-seeking gaze toward supporting the cultural knowledge that immigrants and people of color bring to the children in their care. Although coming from separate places in the field, both Ai-jen and Mariana advocate for dignity and respect for the people who care for and educate our society’s children.
Too often I am in rooms with academics who become nervous when talk turns to politics. To their thinking, research should be neutral, above the political fray. That perspective belies the reality that research is never neutral.
It has always been influenced by the values and beliefs of both those who produce it and those who consume it (. Rather than ignore politics (which should not be confused with partisanship), Hiro Yoshikawa and Andrew Nalani call on researchers to interrogate how political ideologies affect young children.
After all, it’s through political ideologies that policymakers and advocates tell a story of what it means to be an American, of who is deserving and who is not. Children have often been at the center of those narratives. Now, as in the past, children’s schooling is the site of virulent battles over race and immigration, and over who deserves a quality public education. Fights over masking and vaccinations are also fought in the name of children.
Ignoring politics won’t bring about a more just society for children. We must dive into the fray with the courage to face the hard issues and the conceptual and methodological tools to study politics rigorously.
Conclusion
In my initial post in this series, I wrote that the Foundation for Child Development is imagining the reality we want to build for our country’s children and exploring FCD’s role in working toward that future. The contributions of our terrific authors have me excited about the possibility of bringing the researchers, advocates, organizers, and funders — who too often work in different lanes — into alignment around a more just society for young children. I am imagining a future in which social movements routinely position children’s well-being as a central concern. I am imagining a future where children’s issues are movement issues. I am imagining a future where social justice lies at the center of children’s advocacy.
We are still very early in our journey as a social justice funder for young children and commit to continuing to share what we learn along the way. We invite you to continue to share your hopes, knowledge, and experiences with us and with each other. We also hope this series has inspired some part of your answer to the question Regis Pecos asks all of us in the fourth generation:
What will be your contribution?
In this Social Justice for Young Children Conversation Series blog, Foundation for Child Development President and CEO Vivian Tseng reflects on the Foundation’s journey exploring what it means to center the needs of young children marginalized by racism, xenophobia, and economic inequality, in collaboration with advocates, parent and community organizers, coalition leaders, and researchers.