William Penn Life, 2002 (37. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
2002-08-01 / 8. szám
Charitable Ideas National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Help bring missing kids home In 1981,6-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted in Florida. His desperate parents, John and Révé Walsh, came to Washington, D.C., seeking help. But, what they found was no help for searching parents and no national response to the problem of missing children. The Walshes turned their anger into action. In 1984, John Walsh cofounded the private, nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC serves as a focal point in providing assistance to parents, children, law enforcement, schools, and the community in recovering missing children and raising public awareness about ways to help prevent child abduction, molestation, and sexual exploitation. NCMEC has worked on more than 73.000 cases of missing and exploited children, helped recover more than 48.000 children, and raised its recovery rate from 60 percent in the 1980s to 91 percent today. There are many ways you, your family and your WPA branch can help NCMEC and bring missing children home. Poster Partner Program NCMEC's Poster Partner Program provides a way for Internet users to be alerted of a missing child in their area the instant the information is available on NCMEC's web site. By enlisting the help of the Internet community, NCMEC can increase it's distribution of missing-children photographs. The Poster Partner Program asks for Internet users to sign up and volunteer their services to help find missing children by printing and distributing posters of children who are missing from their area. Internet users may subscribe online to one or more of the six geographical zones from which to receive missingchild posters. The zones divide the United States into six areas of equal population. Poster partners may choose to participate in one or more zones from which to receive missingchild posters. When a missing child is entered on NCMEC's web site, NCMEC will send out a Missing Child Poster Partner Alert by E-mail to all poster partners in the relevant zone(s). KidCare ID Many community and children's groups such as the Kiwanis and Girl Scouts have organized a KidCare ID event in their neighborhood or school. So can your branch. KidCare ID is similar to a passport for children. The ID booklet holds critical information about a child that can be given to law enforcement in the unlikely event that the child should become missing. KidCare ID events require a sponsor, a location to host the event, and volunteers to take photographs of children. A KidCare project can be run as a standalone event (where educating the community about child safety is the focus), as part of a larger local event (such as a community day), or even as part of a regionally/nationally sponsored program. Promote Cyberspace Safety Cyberspace offers a multitude of wonderful opportunities but also presents a degree of risk. NCMEC has adopted an important role in helping to educate children (and their parents) about online safety through its mousepad program. The goal is to provide 100 "online safety mousepads" and support materials to every school in the United States. NCMEC seeks volunteers who can help identify civic-minded sponsors in their state or local community to place mousepads in their schools or libraries. The mousepads carry NCMEC's "my rules for online safety" excerpted from Child Safety on the Information Highway. In addition to the mousepads, an Internet safety brochure, "Teen or Child Safety on the Information Highway," is usually included in the package. The mousepads and brochures have been extremely popular with teachers, librarians, parents, and children nationwide. The materials provide a teaching tool for instructors who can then reinforce the messages with their students. The brochures cost 50 cents a piece. The mouses pads cost $265 for 100 pads, but the cost per pad decreases with increased quantities. ||V||| Charity Links To learn more about how you and your branch can help search for missing children, log onto the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at: O www.ncmec.org William Penn Lite, August/September 2002 3
