Roll Away the Stone: Saving America's Children

Children have no control of how they grow up, which is why care for children is at the forefront of many's minds. Now in a newly expanded and updated second edition, "Roll Away the Stone: Saving America's Children" is a book describing the organization known as 'For Love of Children', a company founded by Fred Taylor and that he served as head of until earlier this decade. Discussing poverty and calling for community action cross the country, "For Love of Children" is a solid choice for those who want to make a difference in their communities.

When you pass a person on a corner asking for spare change, what do you think? After more than thirty years of working with poor children and their families in DC, Fred Taylor has a pretty good guess. Either you tend to have a "liberal" response and blame society, or a more "conservative" response and blame the individual. But neither view, Taylor believes, helps us get closer to the goal of saving more children from growing up to be that person on the corner. Taylor has written a book, Roll Away the Stone: Saving America's Children, to present an alternative model for responding to the plight of poor children and their families. The paradigm he presents focuses on what's best about people, and seeks to build partnerships with communities that capitalize on the life-giving potential of the people who live there. But he doesn't ignore the worst either: one of his chapters focuses solely on the complications of drug addiction, and he frequently addresses tangles of dysfunctional behaviors. By including the good, bad and ugly, Taylor is able to come up with a holistic model that offers a potential way out of the persistent poverty that is life for 1 in 5 children in America. Taylor tells great stories, as any good Baptist preacher should, which fill and enliven the book. The Biblical story of the title -- Jesus calling Lazarus up from death -- is reinterpreted throughout. The real-life story of Taylor and his allies' work to close Junior Village, a institution that housed 900 of DC's poorest children in the 1960's, provides the hope of success and the reality of continued struggle in our own backyard. Marcus's story, and the stories of many other DC children and their families, help drive the book's urgency. Other stories of Taylor himself on Outward Bound adventures exemplify the challenges and the risks of new thinking and acting. Perhaps as valuable as the new paradigm is Taylor's candor about mistakes made and his own human struggle to reject despair. The organization Taylor founded in 1966 and still leads, For Love of Children (FLOC), has tried many things to save the poor children of DC and has learned many lessons. FLOC's apartments, for families who need the housing to fend off homelessness and keep their children out of the foster care system, has had a change in management policies to ensure a balance between compassion for uniquely vulnerable tenants and tenant responsibility for rent and property. Some of FLOC's other work, such as policy advocacy, has faded, while new ground has been broken -- notably, in the outdoor education program and camp. Taylor's experience of going where he is led to experiment, fail, succeed, learn, despair, and persist ultimately makes Roll Away the Stone an inspirational tale. For the millions of Americans involved with community outreach efforts, the book provides interesting possibilities for how to work in new ways with poor children and their famil