Taylor’s passionate plea is in response to the startling fact that a greater percentage of our children are reading below grade level today than when she resigned from her day-to-day duties at Essence magazine to pursue a passion — a mentoring initiative. “Eighty percent of black 4th graders were reading below grade level when I left Essence four years ago. Today, that number is actually is 86 percent. We are losing ground,” she comments.
Taylor, while still leading the magazine in 2006, founded the National CARES Mentoring Movement as Essence CARES following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The National CARES Mentoring Movement is a call to communities to mentor our vulnerable youth. National CARES is not a mentoring organization, but works on behalf of mentoring and youth-support organizations, schools and reentry programs to recruit desperately needed African American mentors for children in our communities. The organization currently has mentor circles in 56 cities nationwide, including a very active circle in Atlanta, the first city to join her efforts.
“The organization has grown so fast, and it really has to do with the crises in our community. The government is not going to save us. We need mentors. Our churches are mentoring the young people who are in the church and what we’re saying is that there are so many dying outside the sanctuary door. There are many kids in school without books and [with] teachers who are stressed out, underpaid and overwhelmed. They need help. So, that’s our voice, our strong voice,” she says.
On a mission to recruit 1,000,000 mentors by 2013, National CARES is hosting an event in Atlanta, “Brunch and Blessings,” an inspirational afternoon designed to nourish the “body, mind and soul” on Sunday, June 12, 2011 at Paschal’s Restaurant.
Taylor continues, “Women aren’t really able to care for anybody else. We have more things that we’re dealing with — the crises in our own family, community and in our work lives. What I am talking to people about across the country is how we can bring sanity, which is the natural order of our beings. If we take a step back, we will see that there are conversations, television shows and a host of things we spend our time doing, but they don’t nourish us. We devote our times and energy [to those things]. We need to take that time back. The [call] is really to get people to invest in their own wholeness. As you help other people, you heal yourself.”
–yvette caslin
For more information on how you can get involved, visit www.caresmentoring.org. African American men and women are needed.
