Remember when the man ran over his wife and killed her in front of their three children?

We said we’d never heard a more horrendous story.

Remember when the man shot the mother, stepfather and son, abducted the boy and the girl, killed the boy, then someone recognized the girl in a restaurant and saved her life?

We were weak with relief for her and wondered how we could help her heal.

It’s been weeks now of daily stories about the torture of a 4-year-old girl, a moppet with red curls and a smile that tears your heart out.

We’re not sleeping so well. We dread another story to top this one.

Are we going to continue to accept these losses?

Yes, you and I – are we going to continue to offer our silent assent to this loss of our children? Are we saying oh well, win a few, lose a few – they’re only kids – easy to get more where they came from.

What could change?

Maybe we need to think differently.

Maybe “minding our own business” is no virtue to live by.

Perhaps there are new ways that courageous adults can take responsibilty to keep ALL children safe.

What are some effective ways of thinking?

Volunteers of America and Partners with Families & Children are teaming up to offer prevention training to businesses, organizations and individuals. Combining the national models Project Safe Place and Darkness to Light/ Stewards of Children, adults are taught how to make their business a safe haven for any child in need and make a safety plan for any group of children. In other communities, every adult trained affects an average of 10 children; so, in five years, we need to train 10,356 adults – that’s only 2,071 per year – and we’d have every child covered.

Our Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery recognizes that parenting can be challenging, and a helping hand, a little break at a tough time, can make all the difference. It takes a village to help a parent raise a child. They’re the kind of people who swallow their judgmental glowers and walk up to a distraught parent with two toddlers in the grocery store with an offer of help.

We have spectacular innovative programs that have developed in Spokane, like our internationally famous “Circle of Security” intervention (developed by Marycliff Institute) that is applied at the Children’s Ark, SCAN, Lutheran Community Services, Head Start, VOA’s Alexandria’s House, Martin Luther King Center and the Crisis Residential Center.

Spokane’s own NATIVE Project treats children of all ethnicities for depression and substance abuse. Their youth leadership development program is grounded in strong traditional cultural practices that strengthen identity and belonging.

Our state Legislature could appropriate funds for home visiting and other well-researched parent support programs; get them off to a healthy start.

The trouble is that most of the helping organizations in our community have resources for about 25 percent of the families who qualify for their services – that means that 75 percent have to get worse before they’ll get noticed.

When they get really, really bad, like Summer Phelps’ torturers, we are thankful that we have well-trained law enforcement and Child Protective Services to deal with them.

But, let’s face it, we don’t give them the resources to take care of every high-risk family.

The rest of us have to step up before conditions rise to the level of state intervention.

“What difference can I make?”

Probably not enough until that “I” changes to “we.”

Can we imagine a Spokane region made completely safe for children because courageous adults have said: “I can join with others, each of us promising to do one thing to make a difference.

“I can sign on to Spokane’s Promise to the youth of our community, send it in to The Spokesman-Review during April, add my name to the roster to be published at the end of the month, count the numbers who sign up, multiply times 10 the number of children made safer.” That’s real progress.