We now have just days to go until more than 16,000 people will gather to ratify the National Family Platform at this Saturday's convention for working families!
So who is going to be attending? This week, New America Media is profiling National Family Convention attendees like Tinsa Hall (pictured above):
Tinsa Hall’s heart, vast as the Mississippi Delta, still breaks at memories she wants no school-aged child ever to endure. It’s 20 years since Robert Merrill, her favorite uncle, was shot seven times and killed while attending Greenville High School, a school one of her four children now attends. A dispute between Merrill’s female cousins and rivals had escalated, the circle of actors grown, until he, once protector, became a target.
As a founding member of Parents on Patrol for Success, Hall and a group of volunteer parents walk the hallways of several Greenville schools. “Maybe if the kids see us, they wouldn’t act as bad,” Hall says, explaining the reasoning behind the group’s debut in 2006....
Hall serves on the staff of Citizens for a Better Greenville (CFBG), an organization dedicated to improving the socio-economic conditions in this predominantly African American city. During the summer, CFBG hosted an Equal Voice for America’s Families town hall meeting, drawing 400 people from across the state....
The impetus of Hall’s activism grows out of her own experiences. She fears for the safety of Greenville’s children and dreads that her time away from home may test her own marriage. President of two parent teacher associations and the vice president of a third, she logs in long hours, sometimes getting in “at seven, eight, nine or ten o’clock at night.” Over a week that never seems to end, she is at “minimum wage,” by her estimation. Yet, all in all -- including her marriage -- Hall says, “I have been blessed.” She is proud of her work at CFBG: “It’s an underpaid job, but I love what I do.”
Read the complete profile of Tinsa Hall here.
Technorati Tags: activism, economy, politics, poverty, families, working+families, 2008 elections, barack obama, john mccain, social justice, current affairs, current events, immigration, middle class, recession, DNC, Democratic National Convention, Denver.
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