Closer to Home : UNICEF Turns Its Focus on Helping U.S. Children

People remember the little orange boxes.

Since the 1950s, American children have carried them door to door on Halloween night, collecting donations for UNICEF instead of candy. The box was a bridge, linking children of the world’s most wealthy nation with needy children in foreign countries.

But these days, the line that separates them from us has blurred, forcing UNICEF’s American supporters--particularly those in Los Angeles--to sharpen their approach to fund raising and advocacy, aiming their efforts toward those at home as well as abroad.

“We can’t just talk about children ‘over there’ because those children live here now,” said Marilyn F. Solomon, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF in Los Angeles. “We have the same problems.”

Since becoming executive director in January, Solomon has dedicated much of her time to refining the city’s understanding of the 47-year-old organization.

In communities throughout the city, Solomon is spreading the message: UNICEF is alive and well and concerned with issues facing children on the Eastside as well as those in Rwanda.

Of late, the Los Angeles chapter has been busy forming partnerships with community-based organizations, Solomon said, part of an effort to increase public awareness of UNICEF and to forge the gap between local and international efforts for youth.

This month, the Los Angeles committee is co-sponsoring the third annual Pan-African Film Festival, a two-week event that will raise funds for UNICEF’s Africa project and two local, predominantly African American private schools.

“There’s such a relationship between the status of children in our own back yard and children in other places,” said Solomon, a longtime community organizer who began her work in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

“I think that’s very different. With these partnerships we feel we can make a difference globally and locally.”

The local organization’s new slant coincides with a national movement aimed at broadening the focus of the organization to include children in the United States.

Armed with the now famous orange boxes, American children over the years have collected more than $100 million for UNICEF on Oct. 31, National UNICEF Day. The money collected on Halloweens past has been used to buy medicine, supply fresh water and provide primary education to children around the world.

But this year, for the first time in its history, the organization has declared all of October National UNICEF Month.

Not only will American children collect money for others, now they will have an opportunity to learn about the people who benefit from their efforts.

The organization’s goal is to have trained volunteers and staff members visit schools nationwide during October, sharing their knowledge of other cultures and places with American schoolchildren in hopes of fostering a respect for differences.

“They need help understanding global diversity, which is not across the ocean anymore,” said Gwendolyn Calvert Baker, president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, based in New York. “So much of it is in the classrooms sitting right next to them and on the playground.”

Solomon recently visited churches in the African American community and throughout the city, encouraging ministers to invite their congregations to the two-week-long Pan-African film festival, and dropping off free passes.

There will be other events this month to introduce the community to UNICEF and to raise funds: a concert featuring singer Maxine Weldon at Lunaria Restaurant and Jazz Club, and a reception at the Alitash Kebede Art Gallery featuring the work of artist Herbert Gentry.

“We want people to know we’re here and the kinds of projects we’re involved in,” Solomon said.

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Ayuko Babu sees a parallel between the goals of the Pan-African Film Festival and those of UNICEF.

“Our mission is to bring an awareness and consciousness about black people around the world,” said Babu, executive director of the festival.

All too often Americans possess only vague sketches of people in other places, Babu said. Sketchier still is Americans’ understanding of the relationship between their lives and the lives of people abroad, how the hot cocoa Americans drink to feel cozy on cold winter days comes from Ghana.

“And the people who pick (it) are poor and don’t have enough money,” to enjoy it themselves, he said.

The film festival “fits right in with” UNICEF’s and Solomon’s goal of “letting folks have a better sense of what’s happening,” he said.

At the Extraordinary Place in the Crenshaw district, one of the schools that will receive funds from the festival, educators say UNICEF’s involvement in local issues will “contribute to the effort to keep children (in America) on the forefront of people’s minds”--a contribution as valuable as the money.

“It just makes me feel very hopeful because so much of the attention tends to be on the children abroad who are without,” said Ernestine Washington, who is program coordinator of the nonprofit educational cooperative.

“I was very impressed by UNICEF’s outreach to the community. My prayer would be that it continues.”