Scholarship Program

A statement from Eric Edmeades

For the better part of three decades I have been through the family court system, and for most of that time I went through it quietly. I told almost no one. I assumed what was happening to me was rare — some unlucky collision of circumstances that belonged to me alone — and that saying it out loud would only make it heavier to carry.

A few years ago I was invited onto Jordan Peterson’s podcast, and Jordan drew some of it out of me in public for the first time. What came back astonished me. Story after story, from parents I had never met, describing what I had believed was mine alone. It was not rare. It was ordinary, and it was everywhere — which is far more disturbing than being unlucky. My silence had protected no one. And every silence like mine had left the next parent certain they were the only one.

That is what changed my mind about speaking. A talk built properly does two things at once. It carries in a courtroom: a parent who can lay out what happened, clearly and in order and without coming apart, is heard differently by a judge than a parent who cannot — and that difference is not small. And it carries outside the courtroom, where reform is actually won or lost, in what the public comes to understand about how these courts work.

So this is what I want this program to do. I want parents to find their voice. I want the advocates and lawyers pushing for reform to sharpen theirs. And I want the children who came through this — the ones wounded by unbalanced parents and a family court system that too often made things worse — to be able to say what happened to them, in their own words, when they are ready. The experience is yours. The lessons inside it belong to everyone still living through it.

Your voice was never the problem. The cage was. Let’s free it — and put it to work.

— Eric Edmeades, founder, Speaker Nation