About The Aging-Out of Foster Care Project in NY
SalaamGarage Local/NYC is a humanitarian media organization that partners with local non-profits to create storytelling for social change. Professional photographers, writers, videographers, create and share independent media projects that raise awareness and cause positive change in their communities.
We partner with grass roots, forward thinking local organizations to find the stories that shed light on the social injustice around us every day. Our current goal is to raise awareness for the plight of youth when they age of the foster care system in the NYC area.
SalaamGarage is excited to announce the launch of this, our new website and the pilot for our first local storytelling projects. We call it SalaamGarage Local, or SGLocal for short. SGLocal/NYC is the first local chapter of SalaamGarage Global, lead by NYC based photography editor and producer Maggie Soladay. Our aim is to help local media professionals committed to using their storytelling skills to make a positive impact on the social problems affecting our communities.
For our first SGLocal project, we are creating stories to raise awareness and inspire action to help youth when they age out of the foster care system. By teaming up with great local organizations like You Gotta Believe in Coney Island, Brooklyn, we aim to help provoke positive social change for this under-served population of disadvantaged New Yorkers. Our team will be creating media projects that they will submit for publication in various traditional and non-traditional media outlets. Additionally, a compilation of the stories will be published in a book, the proceeds of which will go to the organizations making a difference for youth aging out of foster care.
To join the team, qualified locally based media professionals completed a brief application. Teams of reporters and photographers are matched up to tell the story of a young adult who has aged out of the foster care system. Our initial goal was 8 subjects and 8 teams of volunteer storytellers; what we have instead are the stories of 15 (and counting) aged-out foster youth stories told by a team of 25+ local media makers.
For the Aging-Out of Foster Care in NYC project, we are proud to be working with You Gotta Believe. You Gotta Believe, based in Coney Island Brooklyn, is the only organization in American that focuses solely on facilitating adoptions for older teens and tweens, the hardest to place kids in the foster care system. Adopting a teen or older foster child is one of the greatest ways to help youth so they never have to age-out of the system. Donate, volunteer, or become an adoptive parent. No one should be without a family.
Adopt an older foster kid. Learn about becoming a permanent parent to a teen aging out of foster care by signing up at http://yougottabelieve.org/get-learning/classes/.
Mentor a foster teen by becoming a Finding Family Mentor to teens aging out of foster care. Mentor a teen while helping find that teen a family.
http://yougottabelieve.org/get-involved/become-a-mentor/
Donate to help You Gotta Believe find families for teens. http://yougottabelieve.org/get-involved/make-a-contribution/
Call You Gotta Believe 718.372.3003
You Gotta Believe
1728 Mermaid Avenue
Coney Island NY 11224
You Gotta Believe also serves the children of both Nassau and Suffolk County in addition to NYC. At the current time YGB holds adoption licensing orientation and training in three locations on Long Island every week: 1) Hempstead on Saturday morning; 2) in Bayshore on Monday Night; and 3) in Middle Island on Thursday nights.
To contact SalaamGarageNYC to get involved with our humanitarian media projects visit http://local.SalaamGarage.com or email chapter chief and Aging-Out of Foster Care in NYC executive producer Maggie Soladay at maggie@salaamgarage.com.
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