My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.
Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.
Good dental care doesn't make you a good student, but if your tooth hurts, it's hard to be a good student.
You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.
In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find high-quality after-school options.
You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'
Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.
When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks.
People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.
Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.
At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.
The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.