Son of Children’s Advocate Takes Own Stand for Kids

One might have thought that Jonah Martin Edelman was destined to run a charity called Stand For Children.

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He is, after all, the son of Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a national charity in Washington that has fought for better conditions for the nation’s poor children for 25 years. His father is Peter B. Edelman, former youth commissioner for New York State and Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 1993 to 1996.

But the young Mr. Edelman, who is 28, says he found his place as head of the fledgling organization, which fights for kids’ rights on the local level, almost by accident.

In 1996, he postponed plans to travel to Costa Rica and instead agreed to help his mother organize a march in Washington to bring attention to pressing children’s issues, such as health care and child care. “It sounded like the kind of activity that harked back to the civil-rights movement and to the protest era, which I missed out on growing up,” Mr. Edelman says.

But even before the rally took place he was hooked, thinking about what he could do afterward to harness the energy and good will of the 300,000 people who turned out. He agreed to take the reins of the new charity, which was created by his mother’s group.

In the two years since the march, Mr. Edelman and his staff of eight have devoted themselves to encouraging and training people to advocate locally on behalf of children, and to get involved in local projects to improve children’s lives. To that end, they have organized 130 Stand For Children chapters in 35 states, primarily by recruiting parents, teachers, child-care professionals, and other volunteers who were part of the 1996 march.

Mr. Edelman makes a point of distinguishing his charity from national groups like the Children’s Defense Fund, which focus mainly on lobbying and publicizing children’s issues at the national level.

As the federal government has been giving state and local governments more power over allocating government funds and running social-service programs, Mr. Edelman says, it was time for the children’s movement to step up its grassroots organizing and build a cadre of children’s advocates who focus on local matters.

Stand For Children chapters have held hundreds of local rallies to raise public awareness, and the charity has also held two “virtual” rallies on the Internet, both of which drew tens of thousands of visitors to its World-Wide Web site (http://www.stand.org).

Until recently, Stand For Children chapters focused mainly on attracting publicity to issues that concern children and on providing direct services, such as collecting food or clothing for poor kids. But they are now beginning to focus their efforts on changing institutional policies that affect children. For example, a chapter started by a student at Tulane University, in New Orleans, is trying to get Tulane to offer a scaled-back version of its teacher-certification program, which the university had decided to terminate. The proposal is now being reviewed by the provost.

Stand For Children is not Mr. Edelman’s first foray into charity work. While attending Yale University, he started a non-profit organization called Leadership Education and Athletics in Partnership, known as LEAP, which matches local college students with children aged 7 to 13 who live in public housing. The students live in the public housing and work with the kids on a variety of activities — using computers, art projects, sports, and carpentry, for example. And they help the kids develop their social skills.

LEAP, which Mr. Edelman no longer runs, is now statewide and serves 1,000 kids in Connecticut.

His efforts won Mr. Edelman the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, which is awarded to the Yale senior judged to have contributed the most to the community while attending the university. Mr. Edelman also won a Rhodes scholarship, which took him to Oxford University, where he earned a doctorate in politics.

Although it’s clear that Mr. Edelman was influenced by his parents, he says his former nanny, who had only a sixth-grade education, also made a big difference in his life.

“She used to always have me read letters and Bible passages to her,” Mr. Edelman says. “At some point I realized it wasn’t so I could practice my reading but because she couldn’t read so well. What I realized was how few opportunities she had available to her, and that made me angry — also, that education and intelligence don’t necessarily go together.” He adds, “Those are important lessons for a kid that grows up with such privilege.”

And it helps explain why Stand For Children’s approach is to get ordinary citizens involved in children’s issues.

“My passion is really around working to enable folks who have leadership capacity to learn to exercise it,” Mr. Edelman says.

He acknowledges, however, that running an organization requires much more than just rounding up people. The charity is just now coming out of a period of transition that was marked by changes in organizational direction and high member turnover. “We’ve been more effective, admittedly, in terms of mobilizing people once a year for events,” Mr. Edelman says.

Chapters, which were once loosely organized, now require their members to pay dues. The charity now trains new members, and it has published a manual to help new chapters get off the ground. Stand For Children chapters must adhere to the organization’s position on various issues and participate in an annual review, among other requirements.

In three states, the group is working to organize local chapters into state federations that will focus on statewide issues.

Mr. Edelman, who was born and raised in Washington and ran the charity from there, recently moved to Oregon, one of the three states where the group has chosen to build statewide federations.

The charity is also weaning itself away financially from its parent, the Children’s Defense Fund. In 1998, the Children’s Defense Fund supplied 30 per cent of Stand For Children’s $961,000 budget.

This year, only 9 per cent of its projected $1.5-million budget will come from the Children’s Defense Fund. Meanwhile, support from foundations is expected to increase from 43 per cent to 52 per cent. The group is also anticipating an increase in contributions from individuals and from the merchandise it sells.

Mrs. Edelman says her son’s work is no less important than what she’s been doing for the past quarter-century.

“There is nothing more important than creating a successive generation of leaders in the philanthropic community,” she says. “It is absolutely right that Jonah’s gone out to try to organize from the bottom up. I had my Mississippi, and he has his Oregon.”