Sustainability Is Fun

Ripples of Hope
Kerry Kennedy
Kerry Kennedy learned from her father early on that public service was “just really what you wanted to do because that was what made life meaningful.” So it wasn’t so much a sense of obligation or a burden, or a demand to serve others that she heard coming from him: it was just something you did because it was right, and it made you feel better to be helping. But one day, after experiencing extreme poverty in the Mississippi Delta, she remembers her father saying to a roomful of people, “You have to be involved.” That moment, as much as any other, Kerry says, set her on her lifelong journey in advocacy – a journey aimed at “exposing the many abuses that go on around this world, in all of its forms.” She has always kept her father’s words before her as a beacon, to keep striving toward a better world. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope…and those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”