Jon Sherry, Founder and President
Jon Sherry is the Founder and President of The Camp-aign for American Kids. A Harvard-trained, non-profit executive, Jon has over thirty years experience in the field, including youth work, disaster relief, self-help development and ecumenical ministry. He is a member of the Seventh Street Christian Church and holds standing with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Virginia. He and his wife, Carol, have three children and five grandchildren.
Welcome to The Camp-aign for American Kids. Please roam around this website and make it your own. Information will be updated on a regular basis. What you learn here will change the way you think about the world.
Let me begin by telling the story of how it all began: It was the fall of 2002 and my wife and I were living in Fredericksburg, Virginia; it was the time and place of the “Beltway Sniper.” Two men—one, a teenager—had been terrorizing people, randomly shooting and killing bystanders from a moving car in Maryland and Virginia. Two of the victims were killed in Fredericksburg, not far from my house. One was a woman loading the back of her van with arts and crafts materials she had just purchased and the other, a man who stopped to get gasoline on his way north.
No one knew how to stop the killing. Eventually the perpetrators were caught, but only by accident; on a wild hunch, a truck driver at a rest stop phoned the police and reported a suspicious vehicle, which didn’t fit the “white van” description that everyone had feared for three weeks. That’s how the murderous rampage of the Beltway Snipers finally ended.
Now, Fredericksburg is only 20 miles south of Quantico, Virginia, where the national headquarters of the FBI is located. In fact, several people in my neighborhood worked for the FBI. After the snipers were apprehended, one of the agents told me, “It could have been so much worse. If there had been other snipers, working in unison throughout the U.S. there is nothing we could have done to stop them. Had there been shooters not only in the DC area but also in Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, New York and Atlanta, we would not have known what to do.”
Up until the Beltway Sniper, I had been working mostly in the field of disaster relief, primarily helping disaster victims outside of the U.S. But after the Beltway Sniper attacks, I began to realize that the greatest disaster of all is unfolding right under our noses—not in some far away place; but right here in our own country.
Take school shootings for instance. In the 1960s there were two; the 1970s, four; the 1980s, two. But, beginning with the 1990s, something terrible began to happen in the minds and hearts of young people. During that decade school shootings increased to an average of one every year.
In our current decade the rate of school shootings is now at an all time high, with the April 16, 2007 Massacre at Virginia Tech setting a grim record as the deadliest of all, resulting in 32 deaths.
A standard response to the outbreak of murders among America’s youth is the increased use of metal detectors. However, The Camp-aign for American Kids believes that the answer is not to install metal detectors in schools, but to instill key values in more school-age children—values such as honesty, integrity, faith, kindness, tolerance and moderation.
No longer can we afford the luxury of simply listening to reports of the way things should, could, or would be. The Camp-aign for American Kids allows us to move 'beyond the woulds', so to speak!
The time has come for us to do more than merely be sorry or angry. We must do what we know from experience actually works. Our children deserve it. We deserve it. Our great country deserves it!
Please take time to learn more about The Camp-aign. If you have ever read or watched the news and thought to yourself, "What in the world is happening to our young people," you will find good news here.
Please spread our good news among your friends. And, again, welcome to The Camp-aign for American Kids! (To continue, click here or, to help now, click here.)
All good wishes,
Jon Michael Sherry,
Founder and President
