Not Just Another National Holiday

In 1988, two years after Martin Luther King Day was first observed as a national holiday, I was working late into the evening with then Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry, Harris Wofford.  Harris had been a close friend and colleague of Dr. King during the civil rights movement.  He and I began discussing the irony of how despite Dr. King’s legacy as a champion of action and social justice, in the two years since the national holiday began, it was becoming just another day off for millions of Americans.  Harris thought that Dr. King would have been appalled had he known that young people were using his holiday to sleep late, go to the mall and watch television, rather than being engaged in efforts to improve communities.

Harris and I envisioned a different kind of holiday, fitting of Dr. King’s legacy of social change.  We imagined diverse groups of people throughout the nation celebrating Dr. King’s legacy by serving others. This service would bring together people of all ages and backgrounds to identify pressing community challenges, turn concerns into citizen action, and build partnerships that would act as a springboard to sustainable civic engagement. 

By 1994, Harris was a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and I was his state office Chief of Staff.  While six years had passed since our 1988 late night conversation, we would often ruminate that the Martin Luther King holiday needed to include honoring Dr. King in other ways fitting of his legacy.  Then, Harris, along with Atlanta Congressman John Lewis, championed this call to citizen action by co-authoring the King Holiday and Service Act.  President Clinton signed this legislation into law later that year on August 23, creating the national Martin Luther King Day of Service.

For the Win: Simply Irresistible

For the Win is a guest blog series featuring the remarkable initiatives that young Americans are advancing to win the future for their communities. Each week we highlight a new young person and learn about their inspiring work through their own words. Submit your story to appear in the For the Win guest blog series.

Grace Li is a junior at Glenda Dawson High School in Pearson, Texas. She is a writer as well as the founder of We Care Act, which helps school children recover from disasters and engages youth around the world to help others in need. Grace is a member of the 2011 PARADE All-America High School Service Team, an award recognizing outstanding young service leaders presented by Parade Magazine in partnership with generationOn, the global youth enterprise of Points of Light.

I think May 15 was the first time I went outside since the end of winter. The temperature was well past 100 degrees, and even a massive amount of sunscreen didn’t keep my skin from burning. To most people, May was considered part of the spring, but in Texas, we only have two seasons—summer and not-summer. Maybe it was because of the heat that I saw the news before most of my friends in other states. While they were out having fun, I was suffering from heat stroke. On the afternoon of May 13, 2008, I was at home attempting to complete my homework when I decided to take a break and watch TV, but when I turned it on, the screen lit up with images of carnage and destruction, in Sichuan, China. My plans for Disney Channel were crushed as I stared, riveted, at the TV, the reporter’s words painting a scene of sorrow and loss just as effectively as the images.

It was at that point that I knew I had to do something, and so that very weekend, my siblings (all between 13 and 17 years old) and I drew up a newsletter to the best of our ability. We went outside with our decorated shoebox-turned-donation box and traveled door-to-door asking for donations. Our main motive was to get the word out that a disaster, a massive earthquake, had struck Sichuan, China, because in our small town what happened outside our little bubble usually went unnoticed. I hesitate to say it was a success in terms of money raised, but this first mission sparked something in me, and strengthened my resolve that I needed to go out there and do something to change the world.

Grace Li. (Photo from Points of Light)

Since then, my organization, We Care Act, has gone from a small, backyard charity of five people (that’s the number in our family!) to more than 100 team leaders from five countries. The span of what we’ve done still astonishes me, because I never would’ve believed that I, a child of now 16 years of age, would be able to do any more than get good grades or hang out with friends.

USCIS Proposes Regulatory Change to Decrease the Time U.S. Citizens are Separated from Family Members who are Legally Immigrating to the U.S.

Editorial Note: This was originally published on USCIS’ blog 

Underscoring the Obama Administration’s commitment to family unity and administrative efficiency, this morning U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services posted a Notice of Intent in the Federal Register to begin a regulatory change that would reduce the amount of time that U.S. citizens are separated from their families while their family members go through the process of becoming legal residents of the United States.

Currently, children and spouses of U.S. citizens who have accrued a certain period of unlawful presence in the U.S., and have to leave the country in order to become a legal permanent resident of the U.S., are barred from returning to their families for as long as 3 or 10 years.  They can receive a waiver to allow them to return to their families before that period by showing that their U.S. citizen family member would face extreme hardship as a result of the separation.  But under current procedures, in order to obtain the waiver, these individuals must apply from outside the United States after they have been found inadmissible by a Department of State consular officer. This process can be lengthy and discourages individuals who are currently eligible for this waiver from applying.  To address this problem, the USCIS proposal would allow eligible immediate relatives of U.S. citizens to apply for and receive "provisional waivers" of unlawful presence before they leave the United States for consular processing of their immigrant visa applications, significantly reducing the time U.S. citizens are separated from their spouses, or children.

Not only will this proposal further the Administration’s commitment to family unity, but the change would improve government efficiency by increasing the predictability and consistency of the application process.