Voices that Inspire

What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. I'm Jack Levine. I'm the founder of the Ford Generations Institute and I serve as a child and family policy advocate based here in Tallahassee. When you look inside communities, we have people giving hundreds and hundreds of hours a year, not for themselves, but for the quality of life of the community and we've come a long way with that, with mentoring programs and other structured devices. And of course, we have our food banks and we have our wonderful faith institutions. So people sometimes accuse me of being too much the cheerleader and not the critic. And I think it's a balance. I think you have to point to problems and I've done my share of that and we'll continue to do that. But you can't just burden people with the problem. You have to come up with the solution. It's again attitude. There are a lot of sad children and there are a lot of very happy children. And there are lots of sad adults and there are some very, very happy adults. The happy adults to me are the ones who recognize that mortality is a reality and yet they want to build something about what they will be remembered. And that's the word legacy. At some point, somebody's gonna point at this photograph of this person and say, who was that and what contribution did they make? And it's our children and grandchildren who will be the judges of that. So since we're the only species that could learn our past and plan our future, those are gifts that I think we should open every day and learn about who was there before us and learn how we could make a difference for the future. I'm Jack Levine. I'm the founder of the Ford Generations Institute and I serve as a child and family policy advocate based here in Tallahassee. You're listening to voices that inspire.