A Note From Our Founder
Literacy is liberation. We are just getting started.
I was born and raised in Sacramento, not the Sacramento of the state capitol and government buildings, but the Sacramento of underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, and teachers who quietly spent their own money on supplies because the children in front of them needed something the system refused to provide. I watched it happen as a student. I watched it happen as a professional. And I reached a point where watching was no longer something I could justify.
The World We Share exists because I believe that a child's potential has never once been determined by their zip code, but the resources available to develop that potential have always been. That gap is not an accident. It is the predictable result of decades of disinvestment in the schools, the teachers, and the communities that need the most support and receive the least.
My professional life has been built around a single conviction: financial literacy, economic access, and educational equity are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation, spoken in different rooms. As Vice President at Parallel Wealth Partners, I have spent years helping first-time home buyers cross the threshold into generational wealth. That work taught me something important: the difference between a family that builds something lasting and one that does not is rarely talent, character, or ambition. It is almost always access.
That is what The World We Share is built to provide for children, for teachers, and for the schools that serve them.
Our programs are not complicated. We fund classroom supplies for Title I teachers who have been spending their own money for years. We restock school libraries with books that actually reflect the lives of the students who will read them. We restore arts programs that were the first to be cut and will be the last to be restored without intervention. And once a year, we sit down with a school community, hand sixth grade students a set of scene prompts and an invitation to draw from their own lives and memories, and we publish the result as a nationally distributed children's book. The proceeds come back into the programs. The cycle continues.
I am not naive about what it takes to change a system. I have watched organizations begin with enormous passion and dissolve when the passion ran out of runway. What sustains The World We Share is not inspiration alone. It is architecture. Programs designed to run continuously. A fundraising model built on recurring impact rather than one-time events. Relationships with schools, donors, and community partners that deepen every year rather than resetting every cycle.
To the donors who have placed their trust in this organization, thank you. Your investment does not disappear into overhead or abstraction. It becomes a book on a shelf. It becomes a box of colored pencils on a desk that was bare last semester. It becomes a teacher who does not have to choose this month between her classroom and her groceries. It becomes a child who opens a book and finds, for the first time, a story that looks like their life.
That child exists. That moment is real. And with your continued support, it will happen again and again, in Sacramento, in Oakland, in San Francisco, and in every Title I school community willing to let us in.
Cherokee A. Moore
Founder & Executive Director, The World We Share
501(c)(3) Nonprofit · EIN: 41-4353396 · theworldweshare.org
