Friends of the Children Founder Duncan Campbell Receives Lifetime Achievement Award at National Mentoring Summit
'More than 30 years ago, I focused on the idea that just one long-term relationship can change a child's life for the better,' said Campbell. 'I'm so humbled and honored that Friends of the Children has grown from one chapter with 24 children being served by three professional mentors in Portland, OR, in 1993 to more than 40 sites across the country serving thousands of youth in urban, suburban, rural, and Indigenous communities.'
Friends of the Children was founded in 1993 and employs full-time, professional mentors—called Friends—who commit to each child for 12+ years, no matter what. What began as a small organization in Portland, Ore. has now reached over 16,000 children and families in 42 locations nationwide, raising millions of dollars to scale its innovative approach to breaking cycles of generational poverty. It is the first and only long-term, professional mentoring program in the U.S.
'Duncan Campbell's vision and determination have changed the trajectory of thousands of young lives toward hope and opportunities for successful futures,' said U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). 'Friends of the Children exemplifies what happens when innovation meets compassion. I am proud to call Duncan my friend. And all of Oregon is proud to call him one of our own.'
Under Campbell's leadership, Friends of the Children has demonstrated that fostering a stable, nurturing relationship with a caring adult can effectively address societal challenges like foster care intervention and childhood trauma.
'Duncan Campbell's unwavering commitment to mentoring young Americans has set a standard for organizations nationwide and reminds us that addressing society's biggest challenges begins with kindness, support, and long-term investment in our children,' said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). 'This lifetime achievement award is a testament to the incredible work he has done through Friends of the Children, and I look forward to witnessing the organization's impact for years to come.'
Campbell's influence extends beyond Friends of the Children. As a social entrepreneur, he has founded multiple organizations dedicated to the well-being of children and families, including the nationally recognized Children's Institute. His work has earned national recognition, including Civic Venture's Purpose Prize, and his commitment to education has left a legacy at institutions such as the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, and Portland State University. Campbell also spent more than 30 years in the timberland investment and forest industry as the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Campbell Global timber investment firm.
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Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Chicago Tribune
Social justice advocate Sister Pat left legacy of defiant compassion: ‘She lived for others'
Sister Patricia Murphy took risks for love. That's how the Rev. Larry Dowling described her Thursday morning to hundreds of people who gathered at a church in Mercy Circle Senior Living Center in Mount Greenwood to honor her life and commitment to social justice and immigration advocacy. The 96-year-old nun — known as Sister Pat — was diminutive but bold. She was rarely seen without her closest collaborator, Sister JoAnn Persch, with whom she was inseparable in action and purpose. They worked in sync until the day Sister Pat died, July 21, in her home in south suburban Alsip, surrounded by loved ones. Together, the activist nuns were arrested four times at different demonstrations over the years. They pushed to pass state legislation allowing religious workers to visit people in detention processing centers in Illinois. Their impact was recognized at the highest levels, from being entered into the Congressional Record for Women's History Month in 2018 to receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award — a prestigious honor recognizing dedication to community leadership and issues like immigration —from Chicago's Cardinal Blase Cupich in 2023. 'We've done the stuff that other people didn't feel OK with, and that's fine, because not everybody's called to the same thing,' Sister Pat told the Tribune in January. Thursday's tributes to Sister Pat also served as a call to action. Yogi Wess, who did social work in Chicago with her at Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly for nearly 50 years, said that if Sister Pat had been in the building that day, she would have likely told people in the audience to stand up for 'the forgotten, the unnoticed, the undocumented and unseen.' 'She was a modern-day saint. She lived for others,' said Wess, 68, who noted that Sister Pat went to great lengths to help her plan her wedding, for which she remains grateful to this day. Sister Pat was born in Chicago, one of five children, to Frank J. and Thelma Murphy. She graduated from high school in 1947 and joined the Sisters of Mercy. She admitted that she'd always wanted to be a nurse, but became a teacher instead. She met Sister JoAnn at an elementary school in Wisconsin. Then, in 1960, the Sisters of Mercy community put out a call for a volunteer to go on a mission in Sicuani, Peru. 'I filled out the form, ran across campus, and put it into the mail slot,' she recounted to the Tribune in January. She lived there for eight years, in what she called a 'house for the houseless' with no running water. In remembering her life there, she focused on the beautiful aspects — the lady who owned the house, named Isabel, who would cook soups and traditional Peruvian dishes, and how the smell would drift through the rafters. Pat picked up Spanish and the local dialect of the region. Photos of her from that time were pinned onto a poster board at Mercy Circle. She is smiling and wearing a habit. James Connelly, 67, said his great-aunt went and visited her while she was in South America and brought him back a llama fur vest. 'Now, I can't really fit in it,' he joked. Connelly admitted that he was a little afraid of the traditional nun garb as a kid, but said he always admired her compassion and dedication. 'She set an example as a strong, female leader,' he said. 'And she passed that on to all the children she taught.' Indeed, when she returned from her time abroad, she reunited with Sister JoAnn and the two trailblazers took advantage of a burgeoning movement in American Catholicism, where many nuns moved from traditional roles to activism. Sister Pat did stints at Mercy Hospital, Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly and Austin Career Education Center, helping teen dropouts and adults prepare for the GED. But in her later life, shaped by her experiences in Peru, Sister Pat prioritized helping immigrants. She and Sister JoAnn in the 1980s and '90s opened Su Casa Catholic Worker House, a home for survivors of torture from Central America, on the South Side of Chicago. Several years later, they started praying outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview. And they collaborated with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to successfully pass a bill allowing religious workers to enter immigrant detention centers. They spent long hours with immigrants in detention. Pat warmed up the guards with homemade cookies and wrapped candy canes. Because she could speak Spanish, she was able to help detainees connect with family members. 'They just loved her,' Sister JoAnn said in January. 'Imagine how much of a help she was to them, speaking Spanish like she did.' The sisters stopped visiting immigrants in detention during the pandemic. And under the current Donald Trump administration, ICE has been unwilling to let anyone — even elected officials — inside, said Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at ICIRR, who attended the funeral. 'Sister Pat always used a particular word to describe the immigration detention system: demonic,' said Tsao. The sisters meant to retire after the pandemic, they said, but felt called to step in and help the tens of thousands of migrants who were bused to Chicago from the southern border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. They founded a nonprofit called Catherine's Caring Cause to help asylum-seekers settle, opening 17 apartments to house 100 people. They shifted to provide 'Know Your Rights' information to their tenants when Trump was elected. In a final essay that Sister Pat co-authored with Sister JoAnn, they wrote about one Venezuelan family assisted by their nonprofit, who they said was recently deported to Costa Rica. 'The parents and their five children were seized at a local ICE office when they reported for a routine check-in as required by law,' the essay reads. 'ICE officials accused the husband of having a criminal background, which he denied. He never had a chance to present his case in court.' On Thursday morning, a migrant family lingered a little longer in the hallway outside the church sanctuary after her casket was brought out. They said they were blessed to be connected to Sister Pat through a nonprofit in El Paso, Texas. Their family of four was staying in one of the apartments the sisters rented. 'Pat was our angel,' said Jose Ramos, 37, whose daughter is disabled and needs extra support. 'She called us all the time to check in.' His wife, Victoria Naranjo, 34, said Sister Pat often encouraged her to write a book about her migrant journey. 'It's not easy being a migrant,' Naranjo said. 'She thought more people should know that.' Ramos said he thinks he might have been one of the last to speak to her before she could no longer use her voice.
Hamilton Spectator
a day ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Emancipation Day talk to highlight Haldimand's Black history
Free on Friday? Heritage Haldimand invites the public to an Emancipation Day gathering that explores Haldimand County's ties to the Underground Railroad. Emancipation Day refers to the declaration of the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. In the United States, some African-Americans fleeing slavery took refuge in Canfield, a hamlet in Haldimand where Black and European settlers lived harmoniously, according to local historian Sylvia Weaver. 'Canfield was a special place,' Weaver told The Spectator in an earlier interview. She described how Black, Scottish and Irish inhabitants 'worked side by side' to clear the land. 'They lived together, went to school together, went to church together,' Weaver said. 'They were all equal and they got along.' The story of one of Ontario's oldest Black settlements is told in ' Canfield Roots, ' a documentary by Haldimand filmmaker Graeme Bachiu. Friday's free Emancipation Day event runs from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Canfield Community Hall at 50 Talbot Rd. The centrepiece of the program is a talk by historian Rochelle Bush, a descendant of Samuel Cooper, the first Black settler to make Haldimand his new home. Bush will tell stories of the Cooper and Street families, some of whom are buried in a historic cemetery in Canfield for Haldimand's earliest Black settlers. In an earlier interview, Bush said the African-Americans who came north to Canfield were authors of their own liberation and should be referred to as 'freedom seekers' rather than runaway or escaped slaves. 'They were self-emancipated (and) found their way to British soil, where they could find freedom,' Bush said. Haldimand's fourth annual Emancipation Day celebration 'serves as an opportunity to reflect on the history of slavery in Canada, acknowledge the contributions of Black Canadians and address ongoing systemic anti-Black racism,' the county said in a press release. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Atlantic
a day ago
- Atlantic
The Birth of the Attention Economy
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the 'excitements of the time,' civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point. The newspaper was an inescapable force, Holmes wrote; it ruled by 'divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.' Holmes didn't think he was describing some permanent modern condition—information dependency as a way of life. The newspaper's reign would end with the war, he thought. And when it did, he and others could return to more high-minded literary pursuits—such as the book by an 'illustrious author' that he'd put down when hostilities broke out. Nearly 40 years after Holmes wrote those words, newspapers were still on the march. Writing in 1900, Arthur Reed Kimball warned in The Atlantic of an ' Invasion of Journalism,' as newspapers' volume and influence grew only more intense. Their readers' intellect, Kimball argued, had been diminished. Coarse language was corrupting speech and writing, and miscellaneous news was making miscellaneous minds. The newspaper-ification of the American mind was complete. The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century created the first true attention economy—an endless churn of spectacle and sensation that remade how Americans engaged with the world. Although bound by the physical limits of print, early newspaper readers' habits were our habits: People craved novelty, skimmed for the latest, let their attention dart from story to story. And with the onset of this new way of being came its first critics. In our current moment, when readers need to be persuaded to read an article before they post about it online, 19th-century harrumphs over the risks of newspaper reading seem quaint. Each new technology since the newspaper—film, radio, television, computers, the internet, search engines, social media, artificial intelligence—has sparked the same anxieties about how our minds and souls will be changed. Mostly, we've endured. But these anxieties have always hinted at the possibility that one day, we'll reach the endgame—the point at which words and the work of the mind will have become redundant. Worries over journalism's invasive qualities are as old as the modern daily newspaper. In New York, where the American variant first took shape in the 1830s, enterprising editors found a formula for success; they covered fires, murders, swindles, scandals, steamboat explosions, and other acts in the city's daily circus. As James Gordon Bennett Sr., the editor of the New York Herald and the great pioneer of the cheap daily, said, the mission was 'to startle or amuse.' Small in size and packed with tiny type, the papers themselves didn't look particularly amusing, but the newsboys selling them in the street were startling enough. Even if you didn't buy a paper, a boy in rags was going to yell its contents at you. These cheap newspapers had relatively modest urban circulations, but they suggested a new mode of living, an acceleration of time rooted in an expectation of constant novelty. Henry David Thoreau and other contrarians saw the implications and counseled the careful conservation of attention. 'We should treat our minds,' Thoreau wrote in an essay posthumously published in The Atlantic, 'that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.' This included newspapers. 'Read not the Times,' he urged. 'Read the Eternities.' But the problem was only getting worse. The Eternities were steadily losing ground to the Times—and to the Posts, the Standards, the Gazettes, the Worlds, and the Examiners. In the last third of the 19th century, the volume of printed publications grew exponentially. Even as more 'serious' newspapers such as the New-York Tribune entered the marketplace, the cheap daily continued to sell thousands of copies each day. Newspapers, aided by faster methods of typesetting and by cheaper printing, became twice-daily behemoths, with Sunday editions that could be biblical in length. A British observer marveled at the turn of the century that Americans, 'the busiest people in the world,' had so much time to read each day. American commentators of high and furrowed brow worried less that newspapers were being left unread and more that they were actually being devoured. The evidence was everywhere—in snappier sermons on Sundays, in direct and terse orations at colleges, in colloquial expressions in everyday usage, in the declining influence of certain journals and magazines (including The Atlantic). If I may apply what Kimball deplored as 'newspaper directness,' people seemed to be getting dumber. Those who were reared on slop and swill wanted ever more slop and swill—and the newspapers were all too ready to administer twice-daily feedings. Writing in The Atlantic in 1891 on the subject of ' Journalism and Literature,' William James Stillman saw a broad and 'devastating influence of the daily paper' on Americans' 'mental development.' No less grave were the political implications of a populace marinating in half-truths, seeking the general confirmation of what it already believed. In such a market, journalists and their papers had an incentive to perpetuate falsehoods. Was all of this hand-wringing a little too much? Has not one generation predicted the doom of the next with each successive innovation? Socrates warned that writing would weaken thought and give only the appearance of wisdom. Eighteenth-century novels occasioned panic as critics worried that their readers would waste their days on vulgar fictions. And as for newspapers, didn't Ernest Hemingway famously take 'newspaper directness' and make it the basis for perhaps the most influential literary style of the 20th century? Each innovation, even those that risk dimming our broader mental capacity, can stimulate innovations of its own. But at the risk of sounding like those 19th-century critics, this time really does seem different. When machines can so agreeably perform all of our intellectual labors and even fulfill our emotional needs, we should wonder what will become of our minds. No one has to spend much time imagining what we might like to read or pretend to read; algorithms already know. Chatbots, meanwhile, can as readily make our emails sound like Hemingway as they can instruct us on how to perform devil worship and self-mutilation. Thoreau may have never divined the possibility of artificial intelligence, but he did fear minds smoothed out by triviality and ease. He imagined the intellect as a road being paved over—' macadamized,' in 19th-century parlance—'its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over.' 'If I am to be a thoroughfare,' Thoreau wrote, 'I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers.'
