Hard work required for the next four years

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

With the Presidential Inauguration upon us and a second term about to begin, many people are asking me about my plans for the next four years.

First and foremost, I will continue to work hard to support my husband and his goals for our country. I want to do whatever I can to promote the possibilities for peace, progress and prosperity that the President Champions and that will ensure America's continuing greatness and leadership into the 21st century. That is what I have tried to do during the last four years, too.

Whether through advocating for health care reform, speaking out about women's rights, promoting democracy and civil society, writing a book about responsibilities for raising children, advancing the arts and humanities, working to extend credit to the poor, studying the illnesses of Gulf War veterans or fighting for breast cancer research and detection, my hope has been to unite people around common goals of creating opportunity, demanding responsibility and strengthening community.

In the next four years, I will continue to focus my time and attention in much the same way -- by working to ensure that people are equipped with what I call the tools of opportunity: adequate health care, education, access to jobs and credit, protection from violence and injustice, and the freedom to participate fully in the political life of their country.

One of the great joys of the position I'm in is that I can help draw public attention to what is working in America and around the world to give people these tools: Small-loan programs have lifted women and their families out of poverty and transformed entire villages in Bangladesh. Grass-roots efforts are building democracy from the ruins of dictatorship in the former Soviet bloc. And innovative charter schools are changing the face of public education across America. I want to help galvanize people to exchange ideas like these.

Although there are no quick fixes to the challenges of poverty, racism, oppression and irresponsibility, we know more now about how to encourage men and women to take greater control of their lives and contribute in positive ways to their families and communities.

In the coming months, I will have the chance to travel around the United States, as well as to represent our country overseas, and to highlight programs that are working.

Close to home, Washington, D.C., offers all of America a moral challenge. It's not right that in the capital of the strongest nation on earth so many children live in fear of violence, attend schools that lack basic resources, grow up in inadequate housing and see few prospects for jobs or a brighter future.

The bad news is that these problems are not unique to Washington. The good news is that we are discovering innovative ways to remedy some of the causes of these social ills, here and elsewhere. Just in the past few weeks, I've had the chance to pursue two of my longtime interests in Washington -- microcredit and early childhood development. I hope efforts in these areas will help make the city the vibrant, confident capital it should be.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros and I recently joined together to help launch a community bank that will provide modest loans to District residents who want to star their own businesses but are typically passed over by larger banks. Modeled after similar microlending operations elsewhere in the United States and overseas, the community bank will promote economic self-sufficiency and encourage investment and jobs in the city.

This is an issue I have learned about visiting places as far apart as Managua, Nicaragua, Ahmadabad, India, and Denver, Colorado, and I am pleased to see the seeds of a great idea planted in our own capital. I believe strongly that lessons about positive change can transcend national borders and benefit us all. That's one reason I am looking forward to serving, along with Queen Sofia of Spain and former Prime Minister of Japan Tsutomu Hata, as an honorary chair of an international microcredit summit in Washington next month.

Last week, I was also delighted to kick off a campaign in Washington to educate parents about the importance of brain development in the first months and years of life. I was joined at a local hospital by children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak to read his book, Where the Wild Things Are, to young children and to hear from doctors and nurses who are integrating literacy efforts and children's health. At regular checkups and vaccinations, these doctors will give parents a "prescription" to read to their children and provide parents with children's books.

As I discussed in my own book, It Takes a Village, scientific advances have shown that the brain's physical development from birth to age three depends heavily on how it is stimulated by activities like talking or reading to a child. We have to do more to educate parents about the importance of exposing children in the first three years of life to spoken words, stories, ideas and language.

To raise awareness about the latest scientific research about the brain, the President and I will host a conference at the White House on brain development in young children sometime this spring.

While the issues I work on may seem different on the surface, they all come back to what I care about most -- ensuring that all people have the chance for a better life. I know there are no guarantees in life. But people at least deserve the right to try. And the only way every man, woman and child will be assured that right is if they are equipped with the tools of opportunity.

-- Creators Syndicate