From the Archives: Star Parker Shares What She and Her Organization, CURE, Are All About — And How Pastors Can Help

This post was originally published in December 2021.

Star Parker, founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), spoke at CURE’s recent policy summit about her life story and her work at CURE.

CURE board chair Marc Little interviewed Star. She began by sharing the story of her Christian conversion. She became convicted of her lifestyle, being on welfare, and trying to scam the welfare system. Star said that after she left government dependency, God provided for her. She went back to college and started a magazine, but the business was destroyed in the 1992 Rodney King riots.

Because Star was a black woman speaking against welfare, she ended up in newspapers and on talk radio. She became a consultant on the welfare reform bill in 1996 and organized a conference about life after welfare. Rather than telling people what to do, she wanted to educate them on what not to do. Star challenged pastors who opposed her work to show up. She thought maybe 40 people would attend, but 400 people showed up. Perhaps 400 pastors attended because they care about their communities, she said. They just don’t know how to help.

“So that’s why I started CURE,” Star said.

Star said that God asked her come to the nation’s capital to do three things: 1) put Congress on notice that the answer to poverty is freedom and personal responsibility — not a welfare state; 2) get that message out to society; 3) and to build a media center so that the third of blacks who keep polling as evangelicals and conservatives would have a voice in the national media.

Black Community News is part of CURE’s media machinery to provide a safe place for senior pastors and their wives to learn about how the economic interests in their lives and the lives of their congregants are the same side of the coin of everything pastors say on Sunday morning, Star said. We need to find out where we got off track with public policy. The same God who said don’t murder also said not to steal. Covetousness and socialism, “which is soft communism,” is theft.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that if someone has something another doesn’t have, she added, we can hire a politician to take it from them. Star and CURE seek to change this and other perceptions.

The video is full of common sense and godly wisdom from a woman who has dedicated her life to helping others escape poverty and government dependency. Please watch the video below or at CURE, and share.

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