Help for At-Risk Kids: ‘We’re in it for the long slog’

February 17, 2012 Print This Post

Patrick McCarthy says, in a blog entry he posted this week, that in nearly two decades with of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, he has never seen the landscape for America’s at-risk children and families quite so alarming as his past two years as president and chief executive.

Here’s an excerpt from his blog:

A global recession, cheap labor in developing countries, a soaring U.S. budget deficit, high rates of unemployment and foreclosure, political polarization – these are the forces, he said, that are conspiring against the country’s most vulnerable, threatening to push the next generation toward a dubious place in American history: the first faring worse than the previous generation.

“The most disturbing trend I see is the sense of social mobility being diminished,” McCarthy said, echoing the Foundation’s latest Kids Count report, one of the nation’s most authoritative annual examinations of America’s well-being.

Read Patrick McCarthy’s entire blog entry: “Help for At-Risk Kids: ‘We’re in it for the long slog’ “