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Please welcome GLSEN’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, Marguerite Kondracke
Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much.
It is a very, very humbling experience to receive this award, and I can't tell you how much it means to me.
It's a humbling experience to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, but especially this one.
As you heard, the Civil Rights Movement has been a part of my life in so many, many ways.
And on behalf of LGBT youth
I want to thank Eliza Byard, and I want to give a special shout out to some wonderful corporate partners of America's Promise who are also part of GLSEN.
AT and T and Target. Thank you. State Farm. Also my friends at Saks. LPGA and Bright Horizons.
So, some special friends gave extra support to GLSEN tonight and that means a lot to me. So, thank you.
America's Promise Alliance is the largest partnership working on behalf of the lives of our young people, especially the most vulnerable.
And it means a great deal that GLSEN was our first LGBT partner. So, thank you for joining with us in our cause for all of young people.
We all share a responsibility to see that every single young person can realize their own human potential.
And this needs to be the case regardless of who they are or who they love.
And we support every young person even if they don't feel the support, and even more so because they may not feel the support.
If they feel anxious or even rejected by their schools or their families or their communities, we need to be there for them.
as individuals, as educators, as organizations, as business partners.
Over the past two years, our alliance has focused on the high school drop out crisis.
Over one million young people are dropping out of high school every single year
one every 26 seconds. Half the youth of color are dropping out of high school.
In our lifetime, people of color will be the majority. And if today half the youth of color are dropping out, where does that leave them
and where does that leave our country? When a young person drops out of high school, it is not they who have failed,
it is we who have failed them.
And how many, how many of those dropouts may be an LGBT youth, and we cannot know because they don't feel safe.
And just think how tempting it is for a person to drop out when they're being bullied and harassed.
And it sickens me to think that that would be the reason that they would quit on themselves and quit on their own future.
Being who you are and realizing your own human potential must be an inalienable right in this great country of ours.
This is America.
I encourage you to join with us, join our Grad Nation campaign. Part of it is making sure that every school is a safe place.
Your founder, Kevin Jennings, who's here tonight. Yay Kevin!
Kevin said it's hard to pass a math test if you don't feel safe in class.
So we cannot, we cannot judge young people by who they are or who they love.
and we cannot, as a nation, afford to lose the extraordinary potential of our LGBT youth.
America's Promise is proud to have GLSEN as a partner, and I am proud to be part of this journey with you. Thank you.