Children’s Sabbath is a national, multi-faith event that asks places of worship across the country to spend a week focusing their prayers, worship, education programs, and acts of service on the urgent problems facing our nation’s children. This nationwide celebration is designed to unite people of all faiths around a common cause: building communities that help children grow and thrive.
This year in Mississippi, four organizations are working to coordinate and promote this national celebration. The Children’s Defense Fund is the lead coordinator, and they are supported by the us at the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance (MELA), the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative and Ready Nation.
We encourage faith leaders in Mississippi to participate, and we invite you to focus your Children’s Sabbath celebration this year on a specific issue: early care and education in Mississippi. This year’s theme is “Where Does it Hurt? Listening to Heal Our Children.” The theme encourages us to listen and learn from experts, community leaders and organizations serving children and families to gain a deeper understanding of the issues affecting Mississippi children. We put together a one-pager to help you plan your celebration, using select resources from childrensdefensefund.org. While Children’s Sabbath focuses on the third weekend in October (October 15-17), we invite you to spend a full week focusing on children.
We’d love to know how you plan to participate in Children’s Sabbath! Please let us know how you’re making this event meaningful to your local faith community using this form: bit.ly/SignUp-CS. We’ll use the information from the form to send you a toolkit with more Mississippi Children’s Sabbath materials.
Please respond by Friday, October 1 – the first 10 respondents will receive a free banner to commemorate their participation!
We look forward to working alongside you to honor Mississippi’s children. Thank you for joining the movement!
