University of Illinois

Ceasefire Annual Meeting
Welcoming Remarks

President B. Joseph White
January 29, 2008

I am grateful for the invitation by Chicago Project for Violence Prevention executive director Gary Slutkin to welcome you. I am here to thank all of you at Ceasefire for your wonderful, difficult and important work. Let me tell you why.

There is a lot to love at the University of Illinois with our three campuses, 140-year history, almost 70,000 students, plus faculty and staff and nearly 600,000 alumni.

But three things have really won my heart since I became president:

First is our pioneering role in opening up higher education and then the world for young people and then all people with disabilities. Unlimited higher educational opportunities, access ramps, curb cuts, wheelchair athletics and the Americans with Disabilities Act – they all started 60 years ago at U of I with one man, Tim Nugent, now 85 and one of my heroes.

Second is the way we bring University quality health care to the poor here at the U of I Medical Center. Nobody else combines the very best health care – like the kind we do at the Walter Payton Liver Center, where people who can afford to go anywhere choose to go – with a mission of serving the poor in large numbers, with quality and, equally important, with dignity.

The third is Ceasefire. I love Ceasefire for one reason: our future is our children. My grandchildren’s future is in the hands of your children and your children’s future is in the hands of my grandchildren. That’s how it is.

Too many Americans think that wealth, walled communities and private schools can insulate their children from each other. But they are wrong. I know – I’ve been to Johannesburg and Sao Paolo, and in those places they know it’s not true. Even trying to insulate ourselves from each other will create a society we won’t like at all.

We owe our children – all our children – the chance to create a brilliant future for themselves. They need a good home and family environment; quality education; and healthcare. But underpinning it all, they need security - physical and emotional security – and especially protection from violence and the devastating psychology of violence.

And that’s Ceasefire’s beat. Giving our kids and all our communities a chance. I don’t need to tell you - it’s tough work.

This morning we got yet another shocking reminder of the importance of Ceasefire’s work. A 13-month-old toddler died of a gunshot in a carjacking in Gary. This is tragic beyond description. May God rest his soul. What a reminder of why we must expand Ceasefire’s heroic efforts to prevent such senseless tragedy.

I really admire Gary’s and Ceasefire’s combination of almost impossible idealism with tough minded, even gritty realism. You understand that speeches about gun control don’t change the real challenge we face: learning how to live safely in a heavily armed society, one with a firearm for every man, woman and child. Most of us wouldn’t have chosen this condition, but that’s the hand that’s been dealt us. Ceasefire works within that reality. Ceasefire knows better than anyone I’ve ever met how to reduce violence under these circumstances.

Again, thank you to each and every one of you – Ceasefire’s staff, Gary, and all you Ceasefire supporters. On behalf of the children – yours and mine and all the children – I thank you.