What makes children safe?

Slought and SafeKidsStories.com are pleased to announce a community launch on Saturday, January 24, 2015 from 3:00-5:00pm. Join writers, artists, teachers and community leaders as they build a virtual community. We are bringing together real people to launch a website and social media movement. SafeKidsStories.com will describe, report, and illustrate Philadelphia programs that create physical, emotional, relational, and social safety for children and youth.

The site springs from organizer Lorene Cary's experience convening the Philadelphia School Reform Commission's first Safety Committee in 2012. In her role as chair, she heard hundreds of stories of excellent, innovative, even brilliant, programs and strategies to make a school, classroom, or even a singular educational relationship into the refuge that beleaguered communities need and that caring educators yearn to provide. At the same time she heard thousands of angry citizens asking why no one was doing precisely what so many were doing with love and quiet success. Indeed, the very noiselessness of safety can make it invisible as well. Like kids in the schoolyard, we adults run, figuratively, to see about a fight; what we do not see is how, in any given day filled with stresses and tension, hundreds of fights are prevented, restored, mediated, or repaired, and, even more critical, how schools build community to encourage safety and learning.

Using a wide range of contributors, from college writers to K-12 students to professional journalists and artists, SafeKidsStories.com will describe, report, and illustrate safety so that we can see it with the clarity and imagination with which we now see danger. If we do the job right, we will shine a light on people in our midst creating safe schools with and for kids, and we can encourage others. If we make it fun to read, look at, and listen to, too, then we'll be on our way to a stealth culture change.