National CARES Mentoring Movement is a pioneering community-galvanizing movement dedicated to alleviating intergenerational poverty among African Americans. It offers Black children in low-income families and unstable communities the social, emotional and academic supports they need to unleash their potential and graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college or vocational-training programs and 21st-century careers. We employ two primary strategies. The proven-effective, consciousness-shifting model, ideated and built by experts over a decade, unearths hope and resilience in our young living with trauma-causing impacts of poverty—homelessness, hunger, unrelenting violence, gravely under-resourced schools and overwhelmed parents and teachers. The traumatic stress children in poverty live with fuels mental illness and physical disease, including anxiety, depression, hypertension, substance abuse, obesity, violence and also the recent spike in suicide.

 

A wide body of research shows that adverse childhood experiences combine with poverty to undermine children’s wellbeing and their ability to learn and thrive. They are unable to sit still and focus. Their parents, who are overstressed and struggling to make ends meet, are at risk for higher levels of depression, substance abuse and domestic violence. Black children overall are scoring the lowest in all academic, health and developmental indicators compared to their peers.