Parker’s prescription

Star Parker closes luncheon series with a no holds barred indictment of liberal policy-making.

Conservative writer and leader Star Parker closed out American Experiment’s annual speaker series with a rousing sold out luncheon speech on November 7 at the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel.

Parker is the founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. CURE’s mission is “to fight poverty and restore dignity through the message of faith, freedom and personal responsibility.”

Her speech was entitled, “The Inner City-Fix: How Improving Our Communities Will Cure Racial Polarization.”

It’s no accident that poor children are three times more likely to be born into a single family household, she said.

“The Left’s answer to everything, liberal answers to everything, was just pour government money at it: government welfare, government schools, government housing, government wage loss, government jobs, government retirement. All of which have fed the conditions of despair and have now spread a cancer in every state in the union, and in particular in our most vulnerable zip codes, and hurt the people that we as a society thought we were going to be helping through the Great Society build-up in the ‘60s or the promise of the Great Society build-up.”

Before involvement in social activism, Parker had seven years of firsthand experience in the grip of welfare dependency. After consulting on federal Welfare Reform in the mid-90s, she founded UrbanCure to bring new ideas to policy discussions on how to transition America’s poor from government dependency.

Parker regularly consults with both federal and state legislators on market-based strategies to fight poverty; she has spoken on more than 190 colleges and universities about anti-poverty initiatives.