Marian Wright Edelman

Date of Birth
06/06/1939

City
Bennettsville, South Carolina

​Country
United States

​Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist for children’s rights. Edelman has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. She is the founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund. The Children’s Defense Fund’s Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. She is a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation and the Association to Benefit Children and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She has received over a hundred honorary degrees and many awards including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Discover more: https://www.robinhood.org/ and https://www.childrensdefense.org/staff/marian-wright-edelman/