Our Roots

The model program for the CARE for Kids Foundation evolved from the inspiration of Florida resident Betty G. Brown, who founded a non-profit organization in Palm Beach County in 1995. The core project offered a peer-to-peer education with an emphasis on substance abuse.  Based on personal stories shared by a diverse group of students, musicals were written, produced and performed by performing arts students and delivered the anti-drug message through vignettes, monologues and pantomimes.

Hundreds of students were transported to the Kravis Center for the performing arts to see the musicals. Subsequently teachers and principals were trained in schools and in workshops on incorporating the program into their classrooms. The Kids to Kids project was successfully implemented in over 100 schools and juvenile facilities countywide.

Seeing the need for such a positive impact on young people everywhere, Ms. Brown and Leigh Updike Braun, now local to Northern Virginia, felt compelled to bring the project to the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area, where the national effort will be launched. The CARE for Kids Foundation was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in 2008 and approved for 501(c)3 status in 2009.

Currently, students from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts are creating a musical based on personal experiences shared in group sessions with students from a local alternative high school in Alexandria, Virginia. The announcement of the premiere of this performance will be forthcoming.

The CARE for Kids Foundation directors are grateful for the dedicated work of those in Palm Beach County who provided the model for the Kids to Kids project here in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area, and in particular the artistic directors and casts of the musicals produced: Beverly Blanchett for We the Living, Sally Ricca for It’s Up to Me, and Ben Vereen for The Magic Continues.