FLORIDA CARES PRESS RELEASE:   

	Florida Cares Overview
- CLICK HERE TO BECOME A MENTOR TODAY!! *

Hi, My name is Eddie Staton, National President of Mad Dads, Inc., and we need your help to save the lives of your young people by showing them WE CARE. YOUR CONTRIBUTION IS SIMPLE, BECOME A MENTOR. SPEND THREE HOURS PER WEEK WITH A YOUNG CHILD. In order to ensure the success of this monumental initiative, we have assembled a new collaborative program based on creating "City Circles" -to recruit 100,000 mentors by 2010.

Florida Cares Mentor Initiative is a call to action for every able Black adult to take under wing a vulnerable young person, which costs nothing. The call simply asks us to join a trusted mentoring organization in our community or gather a number of friends and, together, mentor a group of at-risk youngsters. All it takes is love and a little time to open the gates to success for our disenfranchised children. If you would like to be among the committed men and women in your community who are leading change, we ask that you join them in working on the most important task that will define the future of our children, community and country: turning failing schools into safe, supportive, top-tier learning environments with culturally relevant curricula.

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* Click on Community Cares Circles to learn more and get connected >

OBJECTIVES

Over the decades, our youngsters have been crying out for help. On many occassions we have ignored them. As a result, review the following stunning statistics:

1. Of all Black fourth-graders in the nation, 58 percent are functionally illiterate.
2. In some cities, 80 percent of our boys drop out before finishing high school.
3. Every day 1,000 Black children are arrested.
4. Nearly 7 percent of Black babies are born to girls under the age of 18.
5. 1 in every 8 African-American males age 25-29 is incarcerated.
6. The number one cause of death for our boys is homicide.
   
   *Source: The California Mentor Foundation Summer 1999 Study*

"Failing schools, crumbling neighborhoods, the carnage in our communities -- all of this must end. We are the solution. Mentoring works. It saves lives. In recent years I have mentored vulnerable young people, several of whom had been in juvenile detention. Today, all of them are steady and succeeding. Studies have shown that youngsters who are mentored are nearly 99 percent less likely to drop out of school; the boys less likely to join a gang, the girls less likely to drop out of school. or become teenage mothers. Mentoring children doesn't require much-only that we engage, love and listen to them, encourage and expose them to a wider world, and point the way to their many options. And the mentor is fed as richly as the mentee. Mentoring our underserved youths is the heart of the Florida Cares Initiative."

-- Susan L. Taylor

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