The Children of North Philadelphia in Words and Pictures

As those of you who have visited this blog know, I recently had the great privilege of spending a day in North Philadelphia among those who are working to make lives better for children, and among the children themselves.

This vlog tells that story in words and pictures. It, like St. Christopher's Foundation for Children that sponsors the programs I visited, holds hope high and (I'll use that word again) aloft.

The music is from Les Choristes.

Thank you, Scott Waz of Audio Post, for helping me re-engineer the sound.

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The Wisdom of Children

I'll be down in North Philadelphia today with the children of Centro Nueva, taking photographs as the children take photographs—as they document their world. We'll be inside a neo-natal ward, down on the courts of SquashSmarts, at dinner with those families temporarily living inside a Ronald McDonald House. Children (my son included) have always taught me the most important things about how to see and what to think, which conclusions not to draw.

The world is a slippery place, and these days we're all sliding. We're watching the green and mostly red arrows on Wall Street, the confidence polls, the housing starts. We're studying the houses themselves—the seemingly permanent posting of For Sale signs, the half-built homes that now stand naked and incomplete in roaring weather. We're waking up to the news that Doubleday has laid off 10% of its staff, that publishing houses can't much afford to invest in new books, that Barnes and Noble, which fought so hard to dominate the bookselling market, is once more clamping down, so thoroughly diminishing its orders of new books that many titles are guaranteed oblivion right directly out of the gates. Monopolizing bookselling was never—but we all knew this—a good idea.

We writers understand that our futures, like all futures, have changed. That it's going to be a whole lot harder to sell the books we love—to editors, to the book-buying public. The choice I'm making, in these difficult times, is to keep working. To read better. To think harder. To go out into the world with children, for example, and see the world as children see it.

We cannot control the forces about us. We can control how we live through this, who we are through this, how we emerge. I need the wisdom of children more than ever. I need that kind of courage.

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My Double Life and the Good Beyond

Though I write mostly about literature and life on this blog, I am off much of the day running a boutique marketing communications firm. Sometimes this means that I'm strategizing with executives about corporate culture and intra-office dialogue. Sometimes it means I'm writing corporate magazines, annual reports, histories. Often I'm collaborating with my husband-partner, he being the designer, the artist, the one who knows the magic tricks that convert digital files into type-glossed, image-varnished paper.

My job requires acting, but it also requires listening, and lately, on behalf of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, a truly wonderful organization, I've been listening to the leaders of North Philadelphia initiatives such as SquashSmarts and Centro Nuevo Creacion talk about the work they are doing, child by child, to make my city a stronger one, and to make the world a better place. I've learned about teens from difficult neighborhoods who have so dedicated themselves to learning and to athletics that they've gone on to such prestigious schools as Haverford College. I've learned about young North Philadelphia kids who have picked up a camera and become true artists—documenting their world, finding the color between the cracks.

http://www.scfchildren.org/

http://www.centronueva.org/

http://www.squashsmarts.org/

I write about this today on my blog, for sometimes we all need a reminder that, in the midst of a mud-slinging campaign and uncontrollable weather, in the midst of terrible losses, there are those out there who go to work each day with the ambition, the intention, of making something right. Of letting bright red seeds fall where they may.

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