it takes a village
by lisa-gaye hall

Western North Carolina’s children are some of the luckiest in the nation. But child advocates worry that their luck may run out soon, if philanthropists move on to the next hot button issue.

“North Carolina is a leader in the field of child care and readiness for school. The situation is infinitely better than it was ten years ago,” said June Smith, director of the Region A Partnership for Children, which serves seven WNC counties. “But Head Start still only serves a fraction of our kids, because it’s not adequately funded. The research and knowledge about what we should do for young children is all there; we know exactly what we should be doing to get children ready for success. But it’s a matter of whether our leaders have the political will to provide funding.”

Smith and her counterparts at the Down East Partnership for Children, which serves Nash and Edgecombe counties, are sharing a $4 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation designed to strengthen the links among the agencies that serve preschool children. And that’s not the only good news in the region. The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina recently awarded approximately $530,000 to three agencies that work with children and families. These grants, from the Melvin R. Lane fund, are used to “improve internal operations” for the agencies, hopefully assuring sustainability of services.

Pat Smith, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of WNC, said, “As a society, we’re not doing a good job making sure children have a good start in life. But philanthropists and non-profits are aware that they need to pull together the folks who are working on these issues, and help them succeed.”

To do that, the Lane grants give approximately $50,000 a year for three years to organizations that show promise in addressing issues of early childhood education, poverty, and healthcare. These grants, which are fiercely competitive, support many different initiatives which “improve the capacity” of organizations, Smith said.
One of those programs, Caring For Children, serves runaway and abused children with a group home and emergency shelter. “We’re about the only folks around here who do that,” said Director John Lauterbach, “and we do it whether you can pay or not. For us, the Lane grant means sustainability for the agency…and hopefully more visibility to the people who need us.”

Lauterbach agrees that North Carolina is a leader in providing a safety net for its most precious resource, its children. “Yes, North Carolina is a leader. On the other hand,” he said, “there are a number of programs that aren’t funded. Our state is broke, and it seems to me that they cut funding to children and families first.”

Though many child advocates who work in the trenches, like Lauterbach and June Smith, wish that government would fund programs that ensure child safety and academic success, others say business and private philanthropists need to pick up the tab. Initiatives like “I Am Your Child,” started by actor Rob Reiner in the early 1990’s, attempt to work with foundations and large corporations to promote private funding of childcare and other needed services. That has been a difficult sell in America, all agree, and especially in this region of western North Carolina where manufacturing has taken a tough hit for the past few years. Pat Smith is optimistic, though, about continued philanthropic involvement in the issue.

“Non-profits have a role in this area,” she said. “We are a mountain people, and we are very independent. We don’t always have a regionally collaborative spirit, which we really need. But local needs are being addressed locally, and non-profits are the answer to that. Government can’t have a ‘one size fits all’ answer for local needs.”
As imperfect as the system seems to be, child advocates—and the region’s families—have cause to be thankful for the safety net that philanthropy seems to be weaving for them. Hopefully, that net will be tight enough to keep our smallest treasures from falling through.

Lisa-Gaye Hall is a mother, activist, non-profit director, writer, and lover of Appalachian music and folk art. Though she has lived in New England and the tropics, she is awfully glad to be raising her children in the mountains. She hopes and works for a better world for the next generation.