https://www.fcd-us.org/sparkblogintro/
At the Foundation for Child Development, our Board and Staff have been reflecting on our ancestors—immigrants, refugees, and enslaved people — whose resilience and resistance light our path as we work to ensure that all children, in every community, have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Just as the generations before us struggled and sacrificed to create a more just society, so too will our actions shape the opportunities and challenges that future generations inherit. This intergenerational perspective feels profoundly urgent in our current moment.
Today, one in four of our country’s children live in immigrant families. These children face grave threats — from heightened discrimination and family separation to efforts to deny access to healthcare, public education, due process, and birthright citizenship.
And yet, across the field, we see individuals and organizations courageously carrying out acts of resistance to support these children and their families. Over the coming year, the Foundation will publish Stories of Power, Agency, Resilience, and Kinship to inspire more such acts. Our authors — community organizers, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and funders — will illuminate what it means to meet this moment with courage, creativity, and conviction.
Each story is one of agency: how individuals or communities recognized an urgent call and responded. They are stories of resistance in all its forms — grassroots, institutional, personal, cultural — and of hope that emerges not from naive optimism but from the daily choice to act, build, push back, or hold the line.
Woven through each story will be the heartbeat of this series:
- How are you meeting this moment?
- What ancestors are propelling you forward?
- Where do you see hope, and how do you sustain it?
- What does resistance look like for you?
- What power or agency do you draw from, or help others draw from, in this moment?
We hope these stories will inspire action, connection, and strength drawn from compassion and solidarity.
Why We Created SPARK
We, the co-editors, are both children of Asian immigrants whose mothers instilled in us a deep sense of responsibility to our families and communities. Growing up, we held close their hopes for better lives for their children while witnessing the everyday indignities and disrespect they endured as immigrant women. These experiences fuel our commitment to building a more just society for immigrant parents and their children.
We also honor our mentor, Ruby Takanishi, who served as the President and CEO of the Foundation for Child Development from 1996 to 2012. Under her leadership, the Foundation galvanized the field to recognize young immigrant children – who were largely invisible at the time — and today we continue her work to illuminate the vitality and possibility of those children and their families.
As community psychologists, we reject narratives of victimhood and instead honor the resilience of immigrant communities. Even amidst efforts to tear families apart and sow division, we see neighbors looking out for each other, parents pouring love and hope into their children’s futures, and young people persisting in their educational and career aspirations. This is the everyday courage that we celebrate.
Where We Find Hope
On a systemic level, we are inspired by the hundreds of organizations across the country that refuse to give up on justice for children of immigrants and their families. Through grassroots organizing, advocacy, litigation, service provision, and movement building, they sustain the fight. We draw hope not only from nationally recognized protests and lawsuits but also from quieter acts of mutual aid, interfaith coalitions, and youth-led advocacy.
We are inspired by researchers who mobilize rigorous data and evidence to protect children’s access to nutritious food, healthcare, education, and physical and emotional safety — the essential supports we want for all, not just some, children.
We are encouraged by foundations that are stepping — or even leaping — beyond business as usual: channeling additional resources to grantee partners in their moment of greatest need and using their positions of privilege in philanthropy to stand up for a vibrant, multiracial civil society.
And we draw hope from you, our readers, because we know that a shared spirit binds our work today and across generations: the belief that a better future is possible, and a commitment to doing our part, with courage and solidarity, to bring it into being.
Please subscribe to the FCD newsletter below to follow each story in the SPARK series.