Welcome remarks at the 2011 PUT KIDS 1st Awards Luncheon, honoring Gov. Mark White, First Lady Linda Gale White, and Frost Bank:
Texans Care for Children, through our members across the state and monthly coalitions and in partnership with many of you here today, brings people together to develop common solutions that promote all aspects of child wellbeing.
Today’s event highlights accomplishments of amazing champions for children who have been critical to this work. Our honorees have given selflessly and with great dedication. Their commitment is inspiring and their actions serve as a call to each of us to give of ourselves and do more for Texas children.
However, what we at Texans Care for Children are asking of our policymakers and each of you is actually quite different.
We are not asking for sacrifice. We are just asking for vision. When we ask that Texans be given a good start in life, it is not at the expense of our state, but in support of the future of Texas. Our call is not for altruism. Our call is for wisdom.
Be motivated by your own self interest. Think of the Texas you want to live in, play in, raise a family in.
We invite you to join in the quest for state prosperity, acknowledging that we do not gain that prosperity by ignoring the challenges seen in our communities, the deficiencies in our schools, and the fact that our children are growing up without what they need to be healthy and well.
We ask you to help us in nurturing the future community leaders, business professionals, and neighbors you want to live amongst.
What that takes is first an honest acknowledgement that when the state fails to address issues, the challenges are not removed from our communities. State savings often become immediate local burdens. And problems ignored exacerbate until they cannot be avoided and require costly, intensive interventions.
After acknowledgement that "cuts” to services don’t inherently remove costs, the next step is courageous action.
While we welcome innovation, there are also tried and true solutions--proven to work in other states, with similar challenges and in small pockets in our own state--solutions that we are not taking advantage of.
Here is a summary that provides some of those solutions--things we can accomplish this session that would make an enormous difference and could turn the tide: solutions that would change our trajectory of ballooning social and financial debt.
We must call on our policymakers to expend their political capital on giving Texans a good start to life, and we must be willing to give them cover and visible support when they do so.
We cannot accept that this is not the session to get things done. This is precisely the session where we must or our prospects are grim--an uneducated, unprepared workforce plagued by unmet health and mental health needs.
Hand in hand with this call, we must demand new solutions to balancing the budget. We cannot continue to accept that cuts and more cuts are the only options available. We have traveled this road: Among states, we spend the least per capita on our population, have some of the very worst outcomes for children, and still face an unfathomable budget shortfall.
Let’s be honest about what it takes to run a state that doesn’t put the majority of its burden on the average working family.
Our appeal is not for compassion, but common sense and state pride. Let’s come together and fearlessly pursue building the state we all want to live in.
