Book Release:

“Children are essentially dreamers … undaunted by adversity or reality-based barriers to success.”

Raymond is a talented young artist who carries his work from a homeless shelter to homeless shelter in a tattered bag but has never even been inside a museum. Inadequate education, barriers to health care, and crushing poverty make it overwhelmingly difficult for many children to realize their dreams. Finding ways to alter these trajectories is a serious, grown-up business, and it’s time for us to act.

In The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First Century America, we examine our nation’s safety nets and special programs that are designed to protect and nurture our most vulnerable kids, but that too often fail to do so. This represents a great peril to our nation’s future. With a new preface and afterword, I address how social and economic adversities and the coronavirus pandemic will impact children like Raymond denying them the future they deserve and the nation’s future depends on. It is also a book that covers my own unique personal and professional journey from the dangers of the racist South to running a children’s ICU, to working with Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and many others helping people in sub-Saharan Africa, to working with Paul Simon to develop the nation’s largest mobile health care program for children living under very difficult urban and rural conditions.

The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America is available now at Columbia University Press or on Amazon.

Other Books:

• Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now.

• Rethinking Readiness: A Brief Guide to Twenty-First Century Megadisasters – By Jeff Schlegelmilch, Forward, Irwin Redlener