Children's Defense Fund

The conceptual motivation for, and later development of, the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) rests with the civil rights movement and social leaders' aim to fulfill the promise of a democratic society by meeting young people's humanistic needs. Two outgrowths of the civil rights movement—the Poor People's Campaign and the Washington Research Project—specifically situated poverty and hunger as national problems that, in part, characterized social inequities throughout the country. Former attorney general Robert Kennedy's visits to the Mississippi Delta to document and understand living conditions among economically disadvantaged groups largely ushered the severity of such problems into the nation's collective consciousness. In 1973, Marion Wright Edelman, a Washington Research Project co-organizer, established the CDF as an independent entity dedicated to improving the lived experiences of under-served children, families, and communities. The institutional mission of the CDF is to eradicate racial, social, and economic disparities via a populist support base focused on children's welfare and needs. Although the alliance aims to enhance the well-being of all children, leaders devote special consideration to efforts that benefit the most vulnerable. Focusing on children and youth, organizational supporters and staff believe, enables the CDF to facilitate broad-based social change, as raising standards among families and communities is a natural consequence of assisting children. Since its inception, the CDF has functioned as a private, nonprofit group financed by individual donors, foundations, and corporations. Into the 21st century, Marian Wright Edelman continued to serve as the group's president.

CDF efforts are grounded in education, advocacy, research, and community service initiatives related to public education, national policy, health care, poverty, and juvenile justice, among other areas. Because the CDF staff is composed of educators who hold expertise in different fields (e.g., health care providers, community organizers, and individuals with legal training), the association is able to target a multiplicity of needs from alternative angles and using wide-ranging approaches. Examples include media campaigns, service learning options, and scholarly investigations. The result is an organizational effort that attends to complex, inter-related forces that under-gird the challenges at hand. Since 1974, the association has followed a tiered implementation approach by [Page 320]operating local, state, regional, and national branches. The governance structure enables the group to put broad-based plans into practice by targeting a substantial bloc of intended recipients in lieu of individual cases that, while important, are limited in scope and reach. The CDF Board of Directors provides additional oversight and guidance.

Both national and local drives have advanced equity-based goals by reshaping civic institutions, such as schools, to be more conducive to meeting the needs of diverse students than in previous years. The 1973 CDF report Children out of School, for instance, shed light on the problem of minors who were not being formally educated, a significant number of whom were youths with disabilities. Subsequent efforts to redress the problem contributed to the passage of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, a landmark piece of legislation designed to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities. In recent years, CDF leaders have pressed for full enactment of the Dodd-Miller Act to Leave No Child Behind, a comprehensive bill reflective of CDF goals for schooling, poverty, health care, hunger, literacy, housing, violence prevention, and quality of life concerns.

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