In 2001, I responded to an article in my local Tulsa, Oklahoma newspaper by applying to become a part of the Kids Count Leadership Team that was forming that year. It was sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), which I’d never heard of. But the goals of the Leadership Team were to promote healthy futures for children and youth in our community. It required a year-long commitment to attending meetings and completing a project related to the organization’s goals.
It was a deeply rewarding experience, during which I learned from dozens of others in Tulsa who were passionate about the well-being of young people. Many of them had much more experience as social workers, teachers, or advocates. I was honored to be selected to join them, and I soaked up everything presented in our monthly sessions.
I had a long-standing and deep interest in children and youth at this point, having served as a mentor to a girl in foster care for a couple of years and as a volunteer in a couple of programs associated with the Texas and Oklahoma state departments overseeing child welfare.
During my year on the Kids Count Leadership Team, we heard from a variety of experts in education, mental health, or child welfare. One of the most memorable was Ruby K. Payne, the author of A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which made a deep impression on me. We attended a legislative advocacy session at the state capitol, where we advocated for a legislative agenda we’d been preparing all year.
At the end of the school year, I completed and submitted a writing curriculum for elementary school students. The curriculum included strategies of storytelling suggested by Ruby Payne that benefited children from lower income households that tend to be more chaotic. The strategies helped such children understand and remember sequence of events—cause and effect. As a writer, I found it a rewarding project. I implemented it in a week-long summer program a few months later with a group of fourth graders.
The AECF organized the Leadership Team and had published the Kids Count Data Book for several years, which included statistics related to the well-being of children and youth in the US. It includes data on demographics, economic stability, SNAP recipients, and dozens of other factors that affect children’s lives. Its data is exhaustive and authoritative.
What I didn’t know at the time was the history of the AEC Foundation or the many other efforts it had made over almost a century to improve the lives of children and young adults. I didn’t know that Jim Casey, one of Annie E. Casey’s sons, began a messenger service in 1902 that eventually became UPS, or that he and his siblings founded the AEC Foundation in 1948 to honor their mother. One of their first supported programs was a camp for disabled children near Seattle.
The organization originally partnered with or contributed to other causes but became independent in 1973, when they moved to Connecticut. It was then known as Casey Family Programs, then a few years later as Casey Family Services. Jim Casey died in 1983, but the organization continued to evolve into programs that benefitted youth in several capacities.
In 1990, the first Kids Count Data Book was published, and which is still published to this day. In the years since, the AEC Foundation has been involved with supporting families and youth ages 14 to 24 to “ensure they have the family connections, relationships, communities and educational and employment opportunities they need to successfully transition into adulthood.”
In 2023, the Rising Leaders for Results Fellowship debuted, likely replacing the Leadership Team structure I was a part of in 2001. It is comprised of young adults from ages 24 to 31 who spend 21 months training and developing skills to become leaders within their communities where there are substantial needs but few resources.
More than two decades after I was first introduced to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, I have a better understanding of their purpose and programs and am proud to have been a small part of their history.
Applying for a place on the Kids Count Leadership Team in 2001 was simply an expression of my early interest in the well-being of children and young people, which would continue to grow over the next couple of decades. Who knew I would someday mentor young moms and eventually teach high school science to them in a program designed just for them?
Like all our life encounters, we store away what we learn from them, and with luck, we have opportunities to use what we’ve learned in future experiences. I consider myself lucky to have applied what I learned from the Kids Count Leadership Team and other volunteer activities with children and youth to teaching teen moms when I was fifty-five, without a teaching certificate. It was clear I still had a lot to learn. Fortunately, my students were patient teachers!
Janice Airhart 