Getting the Kids’ Faces (and stories) Out There

I went to the open­ing of the cur­rent Hear Gallery exhibit at the Lib­erty Sci­ence Cen­ter last Fri­day. The open­ing con­sisted of 100 pho­tographs of chil­dren, mostly teenagers, in fos­ter care in New Jer­sey. The goal of the exhi­bi­tion is to find fam­i­lies for the chil­dren. The open­ing was hugely impres­sive in the sci­ence cen­ter with a large crowd in atten­dance. I have been to sev­eral Heart Gallery events in the past, includ­ing a photo shoot and an edit­ing ses­sion at the Time-Life build­ing. Najlah Hicks, co-founder of The Heart Gallery, is a friend from Par­sons. I am always hugely impressed with the work she does and feel priv­i­leged to wit­ness it. I brought Jim Bolas, direc­tor of edu­ca­tion for The Empire State Coali­tion on Youth and Fam­ily Ser­vices, to the open­ing. The agency is respon­si­ble for address­ing youth home­less­ness in New York City and just pub­lished pre­lim­i­nary find­ings from a sur­vey they con­ducted. The kids that Najlah’s non profit helps to get adopted are the same kids that Jim’s orga­ni­za­tion would likely have to help if they didn’t find a fam­ily. The prospects for kids who age out of fos­ter care are ter­ri­bly grim. I brought Jim because he and I have been talk­ing over the past year about media strate­gies for his orga­ni­za­tion. Right now their media out­reach is lim­ited. The Heart Gal­ley is on the other end of the extreme, with top pho­tog­ra­phers and photo edi­tors vol­un­teer­ing their time and New Jersey’s biggest news­pa­per, The Star Ledger, con­sis­tently cov­er­ing the gallery’s activ­i­ties. Last week’s issue of Peo­ple Mag­a­zine has a five page story on the gallery.

The chal­lenges fac­ing The Empire State Coali­tion are rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than those fac­ing The Heart Gallery. As Jim put it, they are not a bleed­ing heart orga­ni­za­tion. Addi­tion­ally, many home­less youth ser­vice providers see the media as preda­tory and seek to pro­tect the youth they help from reporters and pho­tog­ra­phers. They fear that expo­sure in pub­lic as home­less will dam­age their prospects later in life. The dif­fi­culty with this stance is that it offers no empow­er­ing alter­na­tive strat­egy for pre­sent­ing the per­sonal and emo­tional sides of home­less­ness. Jim is very aware of this, and we have been chat­ting about the impli­ca­tions and options.