… and other unsung everyday heroes can identify with that? Putting everyone first…except yourself. It has to change.
“My mother was really depressed all of my life, and I thought it had to do with me,” she says. “So one day my uncle straightened me out. He said, ‘Susan, it’s not you. Babs has been depressed since she was a little child. So don’t take it personally.’ That was clarifying and also liberating.”
“I sought help, and everything began to unfold,” Taylor continues. “Hiding sadness makes you more and more sad because it closes you off to your healing. Giving voice to what you’re feeling is part of the healing.”
The organization that Susan now heads is all about transparency and giving voice to the next generation through real-life mentoring.
Founded by Taylor in 2005 as Essence CARES, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, today the National CARES Mentoring Movement is a community-mobilization movement dedicated to healing and advancing our nation’s most defenseless children, our African American young trapped in a cycle of intergenerational poverty. In 58 U.S. cities, CARES affiliates recruit, train and connect adults to local youth-serving organizations desperate for Black volunteers. Additionally, National CARES is building for scaling and replication, transformational group-mentoring programs focused on the emotional, social and academic development of struggling children in our country’s most under-resourced schools. In January, 2008, Taylor left Essence magazine after 27 years as chief editor to work full-time with community leaders in mounting what has become the largest mentoring movement in the nation’s history and the only organization providing mentoring, healing and wellness services on a national scale for Black children.
“Mentoring is all about caring,” Taylor said. “It’s caring enough to spend one hour a week to advise and guide a vulnerable young person. None of the forces claiming our children’s lives are more powerful than our commitment and love. We are the solution.”
According to its mission, the National CARES Mentoring Movement seeks to end the struggles of Black America by connecting concerned adults with mentoring opportunities across the nation. Individuals are asked to volunteer at least an hour a week for a year to guide and encourage challenged youngsters in one-to-one or group mentoring relationships, where several adults spend time with a larger number of children.
“With mentoring I see light shining at the end of a long dark tunnel,” explains Taylor. “There is a chance that if I devote more time and space in my life to learning and working with the growing number of community leaders throughout the nation who are organizing local Cares mentoring efforts, such a movement will succeed in doing what political will and public policy have not done: give our children in peril a chance to develop the extraordinary in themselves.”