Rob Davis' Speech for The Love Cures Benefit Concert on June 26, 2017

Good evening,

We live in an extraordinary time. In a world of ferocious events unfolding at breakneck speed. Unimaginable atrocities and even Mother Nature periodically throwing some wrenches into the works. We pray that Mother provides the worst of the horrors we are forced to face. We pray that theviolence and struggle and loss of life, home and family being faced by so many in the worldtoday remains a distant phenomenon that we witness only on TV and not in our own homes andon our own streets.

We wonder to ourselves, what the heck would I do? Am I prepared? Should I be? What can I orshould I do? We wonder what we can do to help in some way.It recalls a conversation I had some years ago with a mentor I had great respect for about some war that was raging. “How can this sort of thing happen”, I asked? “What does it mean about thehuman race?”

He responded, ” Don’t spend even 5 minutes in worry about the human race and its various wars. History is full of wars. “Worry instead about the wars you have raging in your own life! Inyour marriage, with your children and loved ones, with your colleagues and co-workers, with your health and addictions to anger, resentment, envy and the like .Worry about those things. Bring peace to those battle-fields. Spend no time on the worries of the world, bring kindness and caring to these endeavors instead. Be helpful whenever possible,forgive easily, turn battles into hugs and pass up no opportunity to help a child.

Though like all of us I struggle continuously, those words have and continue to be a guidepost to help me through rough spots and remind me of what I can and should be doing. They helpedguide me 20 years ago, to start Hedge Funds Care/Help for children, the financial services, industry charity devoted to saving children from the trauma of abuse.HFC is now a global effort with chapters in 7 Countries and 12 cities, and has made over 1,000 grants of more than $46million. Importantly, in many of those 20 years it has made significant grants to the very organization we are here to support this evening, the wonderful NY Center

For Children, that saves the lives of children identified by the authorities, as having been sexually or physically abused. And so it is good tonight, that with all the worries of the world swirling around us we are gathered here to, as the man said, “Pass Up no Opportunity To Help a Child”, and focus on something that we CAN do.In closing, I’d like to share an important lesson I’ve learned. There are many compelling and heart-breaking childhood issues, including but not limited to horrors like leukemia, cystic fibrosis, cancer, cerebral palsy, autism and more. And if your child was afflicted with one of them, you would most likely be a raging advocate behind raising funding for research in that area. In fact the vast majority of funding for any of these issues comes from the parents of the afflicted children.

However in the case of child abuse there is no such parental constituency. Think about it. If your child were, heaven forbid, abused by the a family member or any of the myriad possibilities of mentally ill pedophiles they could potentially encounter, you would most likely be in therapy with your child, protecting them, and hopefully getting them into the hands of the kinds of professionals here tonight from the NY Center for Children. For the challenging fact is, that as a charity, child abuse is an orphan, with no parents in sight, and at the bottom of the totem pole of what gets funding. And yet you’d probably agree that there are few things more important than protecting a 5 or 6 or 7 year old child, or any age child from the ravages of sexual or physical abuse.

So thank you for being here. Please come say hello. And more importantly, please reach deep to help The Center.

God Bless!