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just go with it, frankly, because she seems like the rest of us—a decent but busy person whose philanthropy, absent some extraor-dinary inspiration, would probably stop at writing the occasional check.

As a result, Caren, who self-describes as not having an “activist personality” and who still has two sons to worry about, suddenly and immediately knew exactly what she had to do. She had to start this fund, and had to focus it on young people with an interest in human rights causes.

“This was her energy, and it was a very young energy,” she says. “I never would have done this; I know I wouldn’t have.”

Caren had to solicit lots of help along the way. To that end, the lightning striking so quickly was crucial, because it meant she could channel all that intense but inevitably fleeting community passion for her daughter into getting the Fund off the ground. And that—with years of hard work and count-less volunteer contributions—is how Jayme’s Fund finds itself in the present day, with an advisory board ranging from pre-teens to grown-ups and two-way relationships with a slew of local youth-centered charities. Over $35,000 has been awarded in scholarships and grants to such programs as Summerbridge Manchester, New England Breakthrough Collaborative, and the Pinkerton Academy. A children’s book is also in the works.

Much of that is made possible by the Fund’s annual benefit concert, which this year will take place Friday, April 11, at the Stockbridge Theatre in Derry, NH. It features jazz performer John Pizzarelli, and Lipkin-Moore would love to fill all 800-plus seats. (As a delighted concert sponsor, this magazine is unapologetic in its endorsement of that notion: Buy tickets! www.Stockbridgetheatre.com or (603) 437-5200, ext. 5122). It would be a nice cap for an event that started without anyone knowing if there’d be a second, let alone a sixth.

“We’ve never sold the show out,” Caren says. “We’ve had up to 600 people, and every year we say this is going to be the year.”

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For more information about Jayme’s Fund and ways to contribute, visit www.jaymesfund.org.

There is no other honest place to start: In April 2002, a 17-year-old girl from

Derry, NH, made a day trip to Boston to visit some museums. That night her body was found 250 feet inside a train tunnel. No explanation ever came for how she was hit.

That addresses the saddest but least important thing you need to know about Jayme’s Fund for Social Justice.

The Fund’s genesis, no matter how tragic, doesn’t explain how it was born so quickly after Jayme’s death, with so distinct a mis-sion. Or how it kept going after there was no more fresh grief to fuel it, growing to a six-figure endowment with an ever-swelling list of beneficiaries. Or why hundreds of people who never met the girl will attend a concert next month—six years later—to keep it growing.

Some of that is answered by Jayme Lipkin-Moore’s unusual biography. It’s easy to see a typical teen-age girl in her world-class doodling. But you could hardly call “typi-cal” a kid who read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at age 8, devoured The Diary of Anne Frank repeatedly, and cut through a pile of administrative resis-tance to start Pinkerton Academy’s Amnesty International chapter.

You also wouldn’t expect the late-night tap-tap-tapping of the keyboard from an average 17-year-old’s room to be the writ-

ing of an underground newspaper, launched because the school paper had no editorial page for students.

Caren Lipkin-Moore didn’t learn about that one until after her daughter’s death, when all the small, private windows of a teen-ager’s world began to open one by one.

“People would tell me things I didn’t know about, quite honestly,” says Caren. “There were things she didn’t tell me, because as a mother I already thought she was doing way too much.”

But there was another, bigger kind of revelation, too, something that started to hap-pen at an unspecified point in the numbing hours after police delivered the news, and it was responsible for everything that came after. She acknowledges that it might sound like something a deeply hurting person imagines to make themselves feel better, or just plain kooky. But when you hear the words come

out of Caren’s mouth, it doesn’t come off as either one.

“I was having a dialogue in my head with her—it felt like she was streaming thoughts into my head,” says Caren. “She’s telling me what to do, and I’m shouting back, I’m not 17 years old, I can’t do all these things!”

Caren Lipkin-Moore is a clinical social worker, so she’s qualified for the self-analysis that convinced her that this connection—which she still sometimes experiences—wasn’t just the trick of a traumatized mind. And everyone else less credentialed should

Jayme with NH State Senator John Sununu at the Presidential Classroom program in Washington, D.C. February, 2002

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Illustration depicting Jayme Lipkin-Moore and her Summerbridge Manchester student, Kerlyne Desire, who is now a Summerbridge teacher herself. Illustration by Jayme Lipkin-Moore.

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Jayme’s Fund for Social JusticeBy Chri s Markuns

Jayme’s Fund will be hosting the Speak Truth to power exhibition at pinkerton academy in Derry from march 21–may 5. Based on the writings of Kerry Kennedy and photographs by Eddie adams, the exhibition brings people face-to-face with courageous human rights heroes.

MVM

As featured in: March/April 2008