LOVE YOUR PARK WEEK

“Love Your Park Week” was celebrated at Olney’s Fisher Park in May 2018. Mayor Kenney attended wearing a bright blue “Phillies” sweater. When he stepped to the podium to offer support for the Philadelphia park system, he did something that appears to be his signature: after reading prepared remarks, the glasses come off and he speaks from the heart.

“I just want to say regarding our issue of equity.... We need to fix our schools, our infrastructure, and our institutions.”

MAYOR KENNEY: EQUITY

“I just want to say regarding our issue of equity, and this is really important for this administration, we need to fix our schools, our infrastructure, and our institutions.

If you are a 10-year-old little boy or girl living in a struggling neighborhood, you go to a struggling school and are not getting the education you are supposed to. You leave at 3:00 or 3:30 in the afternoon and go to a recreation center or library for after-school help or computer access and everything is a mess, the ceiling is falling in and rain is coming through the windows. By the time you’re 18-20-years-old you have no feeling of equity in your life — you become cold, become cold to life, cold to interactions with people and that’s what we need to stop.

In addition to changing our poverty issues, we need to be sure that young people in our neighborhoods understand that we care about them and that there is a future in the city for them. I know that the beverage tax annoys people every now and then [this tax pays for Philadelphia’s free pre-K program], but when you have other governments like Washington D.C. which is a total mess, Harrisburg which is less of a mess but still a mess, not wanting to invest in people or invest in education, invest in our population, we have to do it ourselves.

So let’s fund our schools, let’s take care of our parks and recreation centers, and fix up our libraries, and let’s have an equitable society for all of our kids!”

“So let’s fund our schools, let’s take care of our parks and recreation centers, and fix up our libraries, and let’s have an equitable society for all of our kids!”

INVESTING IN CHILDREN

One answer to the question is that he is a man who sees investing in children as critical for the future. Not doing so means at-risk kids leading to an endless cycle of poverty, lawlessness, and declining cities. His hand always goes out to children.