The Family Table, an Ashoka Youth Venture
"The Family Table" was created to raise foster care awareness in the school and the community and to offer assistance to the foster care students who attend my school. The ultimate goal of The Family Table is to promote academic success throughout the foster care population at Miami Carol City High School. This project included classroom presentations, meetings, family dinners, social media exposure, and community outreach. Part of the project is to raise awareness to the community. Promoting awareness through social media allowed for more people to have access to this information. The social media sites were used to update people about the on-going activities of "The Family Table."The Miami Carol City branch was created in order to educate the staff and students about foster care and this was also where a majority of the project took place. This is where the classroom presentations, the family dinners, meetings, and part of the campaign awareness took place. I went to different classrooms around the school and spoke to students of different grade levels about my project and foster care in general. These classes included law, history, and economics classes.Every month, the foster care students met for a dinner. I teamed up with the FCCLA club at my school to assist the students in preparing a dinner that we could sit down and eat together. At these meetings, different guest speakers came and talked to the students about being able to succeed even though they are foster children. These guest speakers ranged from college students to attorneys.I met with the foster care population at my school regularly to check up on their grades, attendance, and behavior in the school. We also discussed how they felt about their situation and if the project had any impact on them. Being that Miami Gardens has the largest foster care population, I decided that this would have the greatest impact.