By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023
Sunflower County sounds like a happy place. But the rural Mississippi Delta county is one of the poorest in the nation. An alarming 54 percent of children live in poverty, and the high school graduation rate is just 59 percent. When I moved back there in 2009 after a...
By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023
Dance was my salvation growing up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It kept me away from alcohol, drugs, jail and teen pregnancy – rites of passage for many of my friends. The arts helped me to think differently about myself. I believe they can do the same for others. I...
By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023
My ‘Aha!’ moment came in 1998, when I was 52 years old. I was buying dorm room bedding for Nick, who was in a program for chronically homeless youth. I had helped him get into one of the best music conservatories in the country. I was CFO of a computer...
By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023
Ray Umashankar’s life changed when his 23-year-old daughter returned from India and announced her intention to help children of sex workers and victims of trafficking in their native country. Inspired by her vision, he and his wife looked into the situation and...
By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023
During the 20 years she ran an adoption agency in California, which has the highest number of foster children in the nation, Gail Johnson Vaughan was routinely dismayed by the assumption – common among professionals in the foster care system – that finding permanent...
