Related posts:

1. HEY’s EYAB had an excellent training for Jewish Vocational Services
2. A Message from EYAB – San Francisco State’s Press Conference
3. HEY’s Holiday Party

Related posts:

1. Fostering Art’s Annual Pin-up Show and Holiday Party
2. HEY’s EYAB Ice-Skating Adventure
3. HEY for the Holidays

Foster youth find themselves sometimes not knowing what they should do after emancipating or who to ask for help. Although there are many different programs that focus on youth, foster youth may not get informed about them.  This happens for many different reasons.   Sometimes the social worker may not be informed themselves.  Sometimes foster youth are difficult to contact, and especially once they emancipate they often are forced to move around while looking for permanent housing, so their contact information may change or get lost.  In my research, one of the hardest programs to find are programs that are focused in helping foster youth to express themselves in a safe environment, as an alternative to therapy. This means it is hard to find programs that give foster youth the opportunity to explore and pursue their skills in art in order to help them overcome many of their daily challenges.

These programs that offer alternatives to therapy are hard to find, but not impossible. So far, in a few months, HEY’s EYAB has found some wonderful organizations that are committed to providing youth with a safe place where they can express themselves in a safe environment through art.  Some of these organizations are:

•    A Home Within provides a year round photography classes to current and former foster youth. They also provide their youth with transportation aid, a social worker intern that helps youth find any resources they may need, unlimited therapy and more.

•    Organic Word brings high schools together to help youth become better writers and poets. They organize literary readings, which are less intimidating than poetry slams. Youth can express their happiness, sadness, frustration and so on because there are no real limitations. Through poetry and writing youth express their emotions in a positive way.

•    Lyric provides QUEER youth movie days, internships, weekly group meetings, and safe sex workshops and a drop-in center. They have resources for youth to go to and ask questions about anything that concerns them. They are totally confidential and are committed to the youth. They give queer youth the chance to speak up. They believe in queer and straight alliance.

•    Writers Corps is an organization that helps youth to develop their writing skills even if they have many challenges in their lives. They provide classes to youth and try to sponsor programs that have the same mission. They see writing as a great way for youth to express themselves and release a lot of their stress in a positive way.

•    826 Valencia makes friends with schools and go once a week to work with youth and help them with their writing. To get youth to feel proud and value their work they have projects where the youth’s work is published and becomes part of the wonderful collections of books that 826 Valencia has. They help youth with confidence, thinking, knowing how to write, volunteering, skill building, elaborating.

•    Seneca Center helps people become foster parents. Then they make sure that youth feel comfortable with the new home and foster parents. They specifically focus on foster youth and make sure that the youth has resources after they emancipate.

Related posts:

1. Emancipation Research Project now Available at HEYsf.org
2. Join the Bay Area Legal Aid Youth Justice Project
3. Free Photography Classes for Former and Current Foster Youth