A Real Page-Turner

Summer fun includes summertime reading. Your child in high school is most likely moaning over their reading list but for the rest of us, a juicy romance or crime story on the beach is an indulgence. (No judgment. Jackie Collins didn’t become a best seller by accident!)

We have an excellent suggestion for your reading list that is a mix of history and political intrigue, with a cast of characters spanning 40 years.  It’s the Children First “History Project” available free and online.

The History Project is an interactive website that dynamically breaks down each year of Children First’s impressive history. Not your ordinary website, the History Project offers audio recordings of the movers and shakers who fought for children’s rights. News reports, research papers, and photographs are compiled in a fun way to have a trip down memory lane and to learn how much work we’ve done together to improve hundreds of thousands of children’s lives. 

This website covers it all from our start in 1977 when a group of volunteer women banded together, to the passage of CHIP in 1992, to 2019 when we successfully advocated for a tough lead-paint law in Philadelphia.

Don’t be surprised if you get emotional when visiting the History Project.  It’s heartbreaking to see just how desperate things were for children and families in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early years, the agenda was driven by the impact of widespread poverty in Philadelphia including illiteracy, juvenile crime, poor health, child and teen pregnancy, and despair.

It’s also frustrating that issues that topped the agenda decades ago are STILL on our must-do list for lawmakers, like expanding health care coverage, ending lead paint poisoning, and fully funding education. Next month, we’re holding a webinar to reveal new research in preventing teen pregnancy (see “Advocate and Serve”).

But seeing that progress is possible inspires us to keep going. The History Project gives us hope that ordinary people can make a difference simply because they cared.

This story continues to be written, and Children First will be adding new chapters as we continue to speak up for our children and teens. We’re not spoiling the ending when we tell you that the last page will read “and they all lived happily ever after” and it’s not a fairy tale.