Orphans like Çilek deserve protection, especially if they cannot do magic to protect themselves the way Harry Potter does!
(from free book Invisible Children, KARA:)
“In your Child Protection System is there a volunteer program from a local law school that assigns a volunteer attorney to an abused child? If not, are there adequate public legal representation for abandoned children?”
Kids who grow up ‘invisible,’ especially those without stable and functional families who protect and give them middle class cultural capital, like dinner table discussion of financial laws and mutual funds, are especially vulnerable to predatory lenders and debt collectors.
Until there are enough pro bono lawyers giving free legal and financial clinics, the rest of us can help in these ways:
1.) ask local community colleges to offer free legal and financial clinics on your state’s statutes of limitations, contract and debt related laws, and consumer protection laws.
2.) ask your law-makers to prohibit law suits on expired (aka Time Barred) debts.
3.) ask your law-makers to lower the Statutes of Limitations on verbal and written contracts, which are often how kids unknowingly get into debt and end up in collections.
4.) Write your own story (or novel) showing a world where kids get the protection they need, in multiple ways…
Please share your ideas for increasing Legal and Financial Literacy and opportunity for ALL of us!
This post is dedicated to my Great Great grandparents Wayne Anthony, murdered for succeeding, and his wife Maude Eleanor West Manzilla, who never gave up her legal suit to clear his name of the suicide charge by the life insurance company, and worked valiantly to keep her family together. Their descendants continue their work.
Quotes for a related post came from a recent ProPublica article co-published with The New Yorker.
originally posted: September, 12020 HE
Action Prompts:
1.) Share your thoughts on how we Human Beings might start to build a more fully inclusive society for all of us, and how stories like that of Harry Potter or Çilek (from Sihirli Annem) could help that process. 2.) Write a book, story, post or tweet that uses these thoughts.
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Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better 
A lot is done in this direction in Florida, but mostly through efforts of ethnic communities who look out after their own, especially the Cuban and Haitian communities which, due to “Dry Foot, Wet Foot” law have more “invisible children” than are acknowledged.
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And that is my concern: where communities, like inner city Black communities, lack the resources of mutual aid, kids get lost in a cycle of vulnerability, poverty, and exploitation which is extremely difficult to break. So a social safety net is needed to pull them up, as early as possible, to break that cycle.
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Absolutely so.
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That’s crazy and impressive re: your great great grandparents! May their memory be a blessing
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Thank you!
My family still hasn’t forgiven me for converting (and still refuse en masse to ack my Jewish name), but for me, my background of origin (my ethnic background) leads directly and logically to my chosen stream of Judaism, and my 2x gr. Grandfather’s education of his kids allowed, I believe, my gr. grandmother and her sister, the OSP teacher (the Oblates were dedicated to educating Colored children), to keep the values they were born with despite converting to what, for them, was a different and even conflicting religion. This enabled both of them to be resources to others, in keeping with our shared inter-generational belief in community uplift and Tikkun Olam.
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Wow! What an amazing way to keep your great grandparents’ memories alive. I’m sorry your family is seeing your conversion as a break in the chain, when in many ways, it was your way of continuing what your ancestors started. Sometimes, we focus too much on the specific details.
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Boker tov, JYP:
Exactly! Exactly! Thank you: this is part of mathematics/critical thinking training (or inductive reasoning vs. deduction, as Mr. Sherlock Holmes like to say): we often focus too much on specific details without putting those details into their larger context, and seeing the pattern that emerges as part of a larger set of patterns. This is complex higher order thinking that requires the skill of meta-thinking, which takes patience to learn. With our increasingly short attention spans, it becomes harder and harder to bring this point home, I fear.
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Reporting another Like from the outer rim by Gwen.
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My thanks to you both, Ranger Mayann, and Gwen.
-Shira
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