The Children Are Not the Story. They Are the Measurement.
On measuring what matters, after a week Winston-Salem will not forget.
In loving memory of all the children who lost their lives and have been affected by gun violence and all violence in Winston-Salem / Forsyth County, NC…come listen to this music: How Are the Children by Wilson Cooper, produced by chromatic black
I have been trying to write this for three days, if not over the past ten years.
There is a version of this post that is cleaner than the one you are about to read. That version goes straight to the argument, cites the data, lands the diagnostic, and closes on the sentence I want quoted. I wrote that version. It is the op-ed that is running in the News & Record this week, and I am proud of it, and if you want the short sharp case for what I believe, read that one.
This is where I come to think out loud. And what I have been thinking about for three days is not the argument. It is the question underneath the argument. So I want to walk through that with you, because I think some of you are asking it too.
What does it mean to be a community?
That is the question that has been sitting on me since the press conference.
I watched our city’s officials describe Winston-Salem this week as “a safe city.” They cited statistics. They cited trends. They were not lying. The charts they pointed to are real. Crime has, in certain aggregate measures, decreased. The indicators they were trained to trust are the ones they reported. I understand the impulse. When you are responsible for a city, you reach for what makes it sound like you are holding it together.
And, while the chart was being shown, children were being buried. The distance between those two sentences, the chart and the burial, is what I want to talk about. Because that distance is where my entire mission lives. That distance is what this campaign is trying to close. And I do not think we can close it until we are honest about what caused it.
The distance is caused by measuring the wrong thing.
The instrument problem
I am going to say something that will sound technical, and is actually the whole argument.
Every community has an instrument. An instrument is whatever a community uses to decide if it is well. For some communities, the instrument is the stock index of their local employers. For some, it is the bond rating. For some, it is crime statistics, or housing starts, or school performance scores, or property values, or how long the line is at the new restaurant downtown. The instrument is what leaders look at when they want to know if they are doing their job. It is what voters look at when they want to know if a candidate deserves a second term. It is what newspapers look at when they want to know what to put on the front page.
The instrument determines what gets invested in.
Read that sentence again, because it is the one I want you to carry. The instrument determines what gets invested in. If the instrument says the community is doing fine when the downtown looks busy, then leaders will invest in keeping the downtown looking busy. If the instrument says the community is doing fine when crime is trending down, then leaders will invest in keeping crime trending down. The instrument is not neutral. The instrument is the decision, before any decision is made.
And our instrument is broken.
Because our instrument can say Winston-Salem is a safe city in the same week three of our children are killed. Because our instrument can say the economy is strong while 71% of children in Census Tract 5 live in poverty. Because our instrument can say the schools are improving while 67% of Black third-graders cannot read at grade level and 57% of suspensions are being handed out to 29% of that student body. Because our instrument can say we are doing fine while we spend $847 million every year paying for the consequences of not having been fine for a long time.
An instrument that can tell you those two things at once is not an instrument. It is a mirror that has learned to flatter.
Kasserian Ingera
I first learned this question from the Maasai tradition. When a warrior returns from the fields or from battle, he greets the elders with one phrase: Kasserian Ingera? How are the children? The only acceptable answer is: all the children are well.
When I first heard this, I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was a greeting. I thought it was a way of saying hello that contained a value.
It took me years to understand that it is not a greeting. It is a diagnostic.
It is the instrument the Maasai chose. They decided, at some point in their tradition, that the condition of their children would be the measurement of whether their society was working. Not the harvest. Not the cattle. Not the position of their elders. The children. Because a community that is well will produce well children. And a community that is not will produce children who are not. So if you want to know if a community is well, ask about the children. The children will tell you the truth about the adults.
I have been asking that question since I moved back home in Winston-Salem ten years ago.
The answer has been no.
Marian Wright Edelman said this fifty years ago
I am not the first person to make this argument. Marian Wright Edelman built the Children’s Defense Fund on a version of this truth. She said, for five decades, that the true measure of a nation is how it treats its children. She was right. She is still right. And most of American civic life has spent those fifty years measuring something else.
What is remarkable to me, and what I want you to sit with, is not that she was ignored. She was not ignored. She was celebrated. She was given awards. She was invited to the White House. Every president of the last half-century has quoted her at some public event. And yet, by every metric that tracks how American children are actually doing, we have not taken her argument seriously.
We have honored the argument without adopting the argument.
And that is a specifically American move. Americans are very good at venerating the people who told us what we should have done and then not doing it. We build statues to the prophets and ignore their prophecies. It is how we maintain the comfortable fiction that the problem was lack of information, when the problem was always lack of will.
I do not want us to do this with Kasserian Ingera. I do not want us to put it on a poster in a conference room in downtown Winston-Salem and then go on measuring the same things we have always measured. I do not want this diagnostic to become decoration.
I want it to become the instrument.
What becomes possible
Here is what would become possible if our community changed its instrument.
If the first question every civic leader asked every Monday morning was how are the children?, the budget would be different. Not at the edges. At the center. The county commissioners would allocate differently. The school board would allocate differently. The foundation boards would allocate differently. The corporate philanthropy committees would allocate differently. The conversation about the summer program, the respite room, the apprenticeship, the mental health counselor, the food pantry, the comprehensive literacy program, the housing stabilization fund, would not be a conversation about whether we can afford them. It would be a conversation about how quickly we can build them.
If the front page of the Journal asked that question every Sunday, the story about the new restaurant would still run, yet it would sit next to the story about what the restaurant’s opening means for the children who live in the neighborhood where it was built. If the bond rating agencies asked that question, the cost of capital would shift toward the communities that were building well children and away from the ones that were not. If the business relocation committees asked that question, the companies that chose this county would be the ones whose workforce investments lifted children up, not the ones whose operations extracted value from exhausted families.
The instrument rewrites the economy.
That is not rhetoric. That is what happens. Every economy is the sum of a trillion small decisions about what gets invested in, and every one of those decisions is shaped by what the decision-makers are measuring. Change the measurement and you change the economy.
This is what I mean when I say we are building a wellbeing economy. I am not being metaphorical. I am being precise. A wellbeing economy is an economy whose primary instrument is the wellbeing of its people, measured through the most honest diagnostic available. We are choosing the most honest one we know. Are all the children well?
What I am asking of you
I want you to ask the question. That is the entire ask.
Ask it in your house. Ask it at your church. Ask it in your board meeting. Ask it at the coffee counter. Ask it in the group text with your college friends. Ask it in the HOA meeting. Ask it in the classroom. Ask it in the hospital. Ask it of your county commissioner and your school board member and your state legislator and your congressional representative.
And when you ask it, refuse to be reassured by an aggregate answer. Refuse to be redirected to the statistics that flatter the mirror. Ask the honest version. Ask are all the children well? And if the answer is no, ask what the instrument is saying that let us pretend otherwise. And if you cannot get a good answer, ask the next question. What are we measuring, and why?
That is civic intelligence. That is what it looks like to become a citizen of the community you live in instead of a consumer of it.
This Saturday, we will walk through downtown Winston-Salem in the March for Our Children. If you can be there, be there. If you cannot, walk in your own way. Ask the question in your own place. Bring it up with one person who has not heard it yet this week. Bring it up with yourself.
We are paying for the crisis. We could be investing in the cure.
Every week, I am going to keep showing you what that means, in terms that are concrete enough to act on. This Substack is where I am going to do that thinking out loud. I hope you will stay with me.
The children are not the story.
They are the measurement.
And Winston-Salem is being measured.
About the How Are the Children? Campaign How Are the Children? is a Winston-Salem/Forsyth County campaign to build a wellbeing economy, measured by one diagnostic: are all the children well? The campaign was launched in December 2025 in response to the loss of a student at North Forsyth High School. Learn more at howarethechildrenws.org
Kellie P. Easton is Co-CEO of Action4Equity in Winston-Salem, NC. She writes here about the architecture of a wellbeing economy and the civic work of becoming the community we say we are.
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THIS is beautifully stated. And it is the measurement we must use. Jesus suggests that the children hold “the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.” How are our key holders? If they are not well enough to unlock the Gates of Prosperity, then all of us will be stranded outside those gates, too.
Please keep speaking out. This framework is life-giving. It clarifies our true priorities. We need this to see what is true before us—-how things really are—-and to take steps together.