When I launched Fourth POV, Inc., more than a few people asked the same question: Why now?
Why start something new in the middle of this much political tension? Why launch a literacy nonprofit while executive orders are actively reshaping the landscape of education? Why invest in creative writing and storytelling when funding for the humanities is being cut and the dominant conversation about "value" in education is driven by numbers rather than narratives?
Here is our answer: Because now is exactly the right time.
We are living in a moment when the direction of public education feels more uncertain than it has in decades. From the rollback of DEI initiatives in higher education to dramatic shifts in how federal funding reaches community-based programs, it has become increasingly clear that underserved children — and especially Black children — are often the last consideration in these conversations, if they are considered at all.
And still, we press forward.
We press forward because no executive order can erase the hunger a child feels to be seen, heard, and understood. We press forward because our communities cannot afford to wait for permission from systems that were never designed with them in mind. We press forward because every young person deserves access to stories that reflect their lives — and the tools to write their own.
This is bigger than policy. It always has been.
Let's be honest about the landscape.
The ongoing tension between this administration and colleges and universities across the country is real. The appointment of Linda McMahon — a businesswoman with no background in education or child development — to lead the Department of Education raises legitimate questions about whose children this administration actually plans to prioritize. These are not abstract concerns. They are felt in classrooms, in school budgets, and in the daily decisions educators are forced to make with fewer and fewer resources.
We see it. We acknowledge it.
But it is not our center.
Our center is the child in Hartford — or Jackson, or Baltimore, or any city where talent is abundant and opportunity is not — who has a story to tell and no journal to write it in. The ten-year-old who has never read a book with a protagonist who looks like him. The teenager who could be a brilliant author, poet, or journalist if someone would just give him the space to try.
That is why we built Fourth POV, Inc.
We are not waiting on federal policy to shift in our favor. We are not chasing the next administration's priorities. We are planting seeds in soil we already know is rich — rich with talent, imagination, and the kind of untapped brilliance that no budget cut can touch.
The work is straightforward at its core:
We give young people access to words. We help them find their voice. We create spaces where they are not just welcome — they are centered.
Because literacy is not a luxury. It is a right. Because writing is not just an academic exercise — it is survival, it is healing, it is power. And because the children who have been waiting the longest for someone to show up for them deserve more than thoughts and prayers and policy debates.
They deserve programs. Journals. Workshops. Publishers. Mentors. Opportunities.
They deserve Fourth POV.
This administration may shape certain headlines. It will not shape our mission.
We are here. We are building. We are writing. And we are doing it for every child who has waited long enough for someone to decide they matter.
We already know they do.
The work of Fourth POV — literacy, healing, and publishing entrepreneurship — exists precisely because we cannot afford to wait for the right political moment. There is no right moment. There is only now.