Again and Again: How Are the Children?

A question was asked at today's press conference: what is the community going to do? We have an answer.

WINSTON-SALEM, NC. This week, families in our community have received the kind of call no family should ever receive. Children are gone. Other children are carrying what no child should have to carry. Somewhere this morning, names are being erased from classroom rolls.

We have said it before. The children are not well.

At today's press conference, officials described Winston-Salem as "a safe city," pointing to statistics showing crime has decreased in recent years. We understand the impulse to reassure. But safety is not the absence of headlines, and it cannot be measured in the aggregate while children are being buried. The question is not whether the city's crime chart is trending downward. The question is how the children are. These are not the same measurement, and treating them as if they are is how we arrived here.

The Maasai ask one question of a returning warrior: Kasserian Ingera? How are the children? The only acceptable answer is: All the children are well. This is not a sentiment. It is a diagnostic. It is the instrument a community uses to measure whether it is, in fact, well. A community that cannot answer all the children are well is not well, regardless of what its other indicators report. By that measure, the only measure that matters, Winston-Salem is not well, and has not been for some time.

It was also said today that the city is "less safe for some." We reject every version of that sentence that treats children as participants in the violence that took them. They were children. They were ours. Every one of them.

We have been asked what the community will do. The first thing we will do is tell the truth about what we are watching.

We are paying for a crisis we could be preventing. Every dollar that arrives after a child is dead is a dollar that did not arrive when that child was alive. Emergency rooms, patrol cars, trauma response, funeral services, grief counselors, incident reviews, the long tail of collective mourning. This is what it costs to not invest in children. The community has already been paying. What has been missing is the decision to invest, instead, in the cure.

Seven children gathered this week to work out a conflict between them. Three of them will not come home. That is not a story about youth violence. That is a story about a community that left its children to hold what adults were supposed to hold. Children should not have to mediate their own survival. When they do, and when they pay for it with their lives, the failure belongs to us.

The answer is not another program layered on top of the last one. The answer is knitting ourselves back together.

Our children need a safe summer. Our youth need apprenticeships and meaningful work.

Trusted adults who know each child by name. Schools that are safe because they are staffed, not because they are policed. Summer programs that run every day, not on the weeks that philanthropy remembers to fund them. Respite rooms where a child can be met before a moment becomes a crisis. Economic dignity in the homes these children are trying to grow up inside. Mental health support that does not require a tragedy to become available. These are not luxuries. They are the vital conditions of a community that is well.

We know what the cure is. We have been saying it. What we are asking for, on Saturday and beyond, is the decision to fund it.

"The question is not whether our children are statistics in a crime report. The question is whether they are alive, whole, and growing up in a community that sees them. Three of them are not. That is the only measurement that matters right now. We have been doing this work, and we will keep doing it. But the community cannot keep doing it alone while the institutions with real power keep asking what it will do. We are telling them what we will do. We are asking what they will do." — Kellie P. Easton, Co-CEO, Action4Equity

This Saturday, April 25, the March for Our Youth begins at Corpening Plaza at 10am and moves through downtown Winston-Salem. It is not a protest. It is a declaration: that every child in Forsyth County deserves a community willing to organize for them, and that every institution with power in this city, whether public, private, or philanthropic, is being called to meet them. The march marks the public launch of How Are the Children?, a campaign to build a wellbeing economy, measured by one diagnostic: are all the children well? Until the answer is yes, the work continues.

Across the ecosystem, the work is already visible. Youth service providers are building Summer After Dark, a coordinated network ensuring every child has a safe, engaging place to be this summer. Full Circle Mentoring and partners have proposed Respite Rooms in our highest-need schools: staffed spaces where students can de-escalate and be met before a moment becomes a crisis. Community leaders are building the long-term infrastructure this work requires. Elected officials are being called to bring public dollars at the scale children need. Local philanthropy is being asked to move beyond short-term programming toward long-term investment in systems. The business community is being called to the table, because no city can call itself whole while its children are not.

This Saturday, we walk. Not in protest. In solemn recognition. In collective refusal to accept that any child in Forsyth County is expendable. In love, for the ones we've lost, for the ones still here, and for the ones still coming.

We will continue to ask the question.

How are the children?

Until the answer is All the children are well, the work continues.