"Focus On Me" is a creative digital storytelling workshop that will take place this Winter, bringing together foster youth living in Washington DC and will teach them how to conceive and create a 3-minute digital story about themselves, using their smart phone.

It will combine in-person and online workshops over a six-week period that will be taught by me as a volunteer. By the end of the program each participant will have a 3-minute video that will be screened at a community event and shared on social media.

Wouldn't it be Awesome to create an opportunity where foster youth are given a space to share their experiences of growing up in foster care in DC and empowered to turn that into cool and compelling digital stories?

Foster youth in DC grow up in a vast bureaucratic system in which their individual voices are lost, and there are hardly any opportunities to meet other foster youth. This program is designed to empower them by bringing their individual stories into focus, and providing them with an opportunity to share their stories and be part of a community.

It is designed specifically for foster youth aged 18-21 years old whose prospects for adoption are virtually non-existent and who are on the precipice of ageing out of the foster care system to enter a world where all of a sudden they are alone, with no financial, social, or institutional support, let alone family support.

This program will reach them at a critical point in their lives and provide them with useful tools that they can take with them in their adult lives. They'll learn storytelling techniques and digital media skills, ideally suited to the social media world in which they live, and ideally positioning them for the adult world of job applications which they are entering. They'll also learn personal advocacy, social and emotional literacy, creative and self-expression, personal insight, organizational skills, seeing a project through to completion, and presenting to an audience.