Date Night Out
The Kansas Circle of Parents® Statewide Support Group Network, along with Kansas Children's Service League, offered 14 families an opportunity to participate in a "Date Night Out". The "Date Night" informal respite care project provided caregivers a night out while their 29 children were cared for in a safe, healthy, and fun environment. Families participating were provided with a gift card to enjoy the evening out while their children engaged in activities such as Wii game competition, Bouncy Blow-up Jumping Center, face painting, Color Explosion Center, t-shirt painting center, and arts and crafts. Infants and toddlers were provided childcare services in the childcare center, which is equipped with many fun childcare toys and learning activities. (read more)

PUSH by Sapphire
PUSH is the painfully graphic story of a battered child named Clareece Precious Jones. She endures unbelievable hardships in her young life. Precious is abused by her mother and is raped by her father. She has her first child by her father at the age of 12 and again at 16. Suffering abuse by both parents and serving as a virtual slave to her apartment-bound, welfare-dependent mother. Precious grows up poor, angry, illiterate, overweight, unloved, and generally unnoticed. She lives in hopelessness in Harlem, until she enters an alternative school where she meets other troubled girls. Cheered on by a devoted teacher, Precious learns to write. What better way to learn about Precious than through her own troubled dialect. Written in the fractured vernacular of the sub-literate teenager, it gives the reader some insight into how she views life and what she wants from herself. It is hard to read because it is full of despair, hopelessness, and hurt.
 

Nonetheless, Precious' hard-luck story sings with poetic beauty and resonates with ugly truth. It's thrilling to see Precious test the wings of her newfound verbal powers, funny to decode her botched words, and sad to watch her revert to frustrated illiteracy when, progressing by leaps and bounds, she's thrown a tragic and unexpected curveball. Ultimately she is able to gain control of her life through her writing. PUSH is an intense story of adversity and what one young lady learns and the mechanisms she created to help her cope.

www.HealthyKidsMN.org is a statewide resource that aims to connect families with uninsured children to non-profit agencies that can assist them with eligibility requirements and enrollment into state-sponsored health care coverage options. Visitors to HealthyKidsMN.org can find contact information for the agency serving their area by clicking their county on the "How We Can Help" page. The site also contains a wealth of easy-to-understand information, presented in English and Spanish, on Minnesota's various subsidized health coverage options.