Get together with family, neighbors, friends, or co-workers to talk about narrowing the opportunity gap by sharing solutions.

Become part of the solution, please...

• It can be as simple as inviting a select group of people to your home for coffee.
• Find out what children in your community need and have an event to raise money. Here are a few suggestions: 
  • Start a drive to raise money for new library books;
     
  • Collect gently worn clothes that can be donated to a homeless shelter for families and children or teens. You can also collect unused hotel soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and other basic hygiene items; 
     
  • Hold a pot-luck dinner and fundraiser to buy a washing machine and dryer for a school in an underserved neighborhood. Children often stay home from school when they do not have clean clothes to wear; 
     
  • Ask your local government or school representatives to organize an event—as small as an evening with a select group of people by invitation only or as large as a public Town Hall Meeting for everyone in the community.

You, as a viewer, can become active, too. Ask yourself how you can make change in your community. Let us count the ways you might activate community outreach, please:

• If your public television station has not yet decided to broadcast the series, please be in touch with them:
  • Go to PBS.org; enter your zip code; find the station call letters and contact information; contact the station’s “viewer comments” person; and express your wish (and that of your neighbor or friend or co-worker) to see the content; if you have friends around the country, please contact them to do the same thing; your wish to see our stories about OUR KIDS will prompt our public media stations to program one of all of the four programs;
  • If you want to watch the content with your friends, invite them to a common place, watch together, make notes, and begin to strategize on how to work together to narrow the gap;
  • If you want to widen your circle, reach out to your local organizations, and try to involve them in your urge to narrow the gap: 
    • Who do you know at, say, the mayor’s office, the local Y, the United Way, a reporter, your place of worship, an online blog, your school or college, a coach, a mentor, your workplace, a local grassroots coalition?
  • If you have access to a coalition, think of how you can spread the message about how to narrow the gap; might you work with another coalition to highlight resources in your community; might you organize a local  OUR KIDS SOLUTIONS Town Hall Meeting (THM) that could be televised by your local public station? If so, here are two links:
    
    •  A video Invitation to launch a THM. Click here to watch the video
    •  A THM Starter Kit. Click here to access the Starter Kit
  • You might also seek out a local “Expert,” a professor, a journalist, an elected official, a business leader, who has a good story to tell about their personal journey to narrow the gap; this person might well be the leader of your coalition; 
  • You and your business colleagues might want to launch an OUR KIDS SOLUTIONS FORUM where people who are passionate about narrowing the gap bring together many educators, leaders, mentors, policy experts, to discuss through keynote speeches and breakout sessions the disinvestments that have contributed to the widening of the gap.
• The new media tools can spotlight the content threads of Bob Putnam’s book and our series: parenting, community, education, mentoring, the on-ramps to success, juvenile justice, detention, homelessness. If we can come together through community outreach to try to solve problems, we can embrace all our kids as OURS.

Thank you, The MPC OUR KIDS SOLUTIONS Team