Op-Ed on the exhibition Seeing Their Voices, held at Community-Photo-Access

Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA)

July 18, 2011 Section: Opinion
In Our Opinion: Fostering understanding

The new state budget includes a lot of belt-tightening, now that the federal government is focused on debt reduction rather than stimulus. One of the spending reductions may apply to belts themselves – and shoes, socks, coats and other things young foster children need. This year, families that provide temporary homes for foster children may not be able to spend their usual allowance on clothing. The budget included a 25 percent cut in that money. Foster families and their allies, like Friends of Children in Northampton, argued that it was wrong for the state, which oversees 9,800 children in foster care, to ask children and the network of families that care for them to make due with less. State Sen. Stan Rosenberg, D-Amherst, and a colleague succeeded in crafting an amendment that will delay the cut until the fiscal year’s final three months. If money becomes available by then, the lost clothing allowance may be restored.

But it’s a maybe. Foster care is a tough business and getting tougher in Massachusetts. The Department of Children and Families has lost tens of millions of dollars in funding. Our state’s child welfare system is in bad need of repair. The nonprofit Friends of Children has seen its state support drop sharply and now operates on $160,000 a year, down about $100,000 from past levels. The money is flagging, but its energy and commitment are not. This spring, the agency shaped a unique public awareness campaign that holds the promise of building more support for the foster care system. For a week in June, foster children in our area exhibited photographs that documented things that hold meaning in their lives. The show at a Main Street gallery in Amherst capped a months-long project led by Ani Rivera. For the foster children who took part, the act of making these photographs, of working with Rivera, was an end in itself. Though it only ran for a few months, the “Seeing Their Voices: Growing Up in Foster Care” project offered something constant and meaningful in lives marked by disruption. Those who stopped by the ETTA Gallery got a sense of the worlds these children inhabit. The photos were accompanied by biographical statements. “Dad chose the wrong person over me,” one boy wrote. “One day you have best friends in school,” a 17-year-old participant named Jose wrote. “Then the next day you’re torn apart.” These “who we are” exhibits can go a long way toward bringing people who’ve been marginalized out of the shadows. A decade ago, the locally produced book “Love Makes a Family” offered portraits based on interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender parents. Jane Lyons, executive director of Friends of Children, hopes this spring’s “Seeing Their Voices” project will expand to document foster children’s experiences and share them with the public. She hopes to win grant support to arm young people who live in foster-care limbo with a tool – the camera – that requires they view their lives in a new way. As they shuttle among foster homes and schools, the self-awareness that arises through the making of art can strengthen them. At a time when governments at all levels are rethinking what they provide to citizens, we must not turn away from children. In budget talks nationally, we often hear blame cast. What did foster children in Massachusetts do wrong? A system that is supposed to help them through crises most young people will never know has been chronically underfunded. The “Seeing Their Voices” project helps take that abstract problem and give it names. If lawmakers want to make it harder for foster children to dress decently, as they meet yet another set of classmates, let’s at least make them tell it to their faces.
Copyright 2011, Daily Hampshire Gazette, All Rights Reserved.

Youngsters capture images of foster care which are on exhibit in Amherst

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

AMHERST – The photograph shows some cute and cuddly stuffed animals – a mama dog and her puppies – sitting on a bed.

It was taken by a 17-year-old teenager, a young man who calls himself BMP, who has lived in six foster homes and three residential programs since the age of 9.

A few months ago, BMP was given a camera as part of a project to encourage kids in the foster care system in western Massachusetts to capture images of their lives.

The project was spearheaded by Friends of Children Inc., a Northampton-based child advocacy agency. Ani Rivera, a photojournalist who lives in Leverett, met with the fledgling photographers every week for six weeks, offering guidance and teaching them how to use the cameras. One week, he asked them to take pictures of something meaningful in their lives.

That was when BMP came back with the photo of his stuffed animals.

This is what life is like in foster care, the photo says: When your parents don’t care about you, when people drift in and out of your life, and when you get bounced from school to school and from town to town, you learn to look elsewhere for constancy and comfort.

‘Seeing Their Voices’

The photo is part of an exhibit on view through Thursday at the ETTA Gallery, at 534 Main St., Amherst. Titled “Seeing Their Voices,” the exhibit showcases photographs taken by BMP and three other teenagers who have been in foster care.

The idea of presenting their experiences to the general public came from Jane Lyons, executive director of Friends of Children Inc.

“We can speak to people about foster care,” she said last week at the gallery as she and several others were hanging the show.

And administrators like Lyons do just that – all the time. They decry the budget cuts and the pitiful $17 per day allotment – and less for younger children – that the state provides per child. Friends of Children now operates on about $160,000 a year, $100,000 less than it used to have, Lyons said.

They point to the rising number of children in foster care across Massachusetts – there are about 9,800 children in placements, Lyons said, up from about 8,500 in recent years. They hammer away at the corrosive effects of treating children, many of whom are victims of abuse and neglect, as if they’re traveling salesmen, as Lyons puts it, who are often shunted from temporary home to temporary home.

But the numbers and the abstractions have only a fleeting effect, she said. Lyons said she wanted to let the kids themselves tell their stories, even though that’s not easily done in a system that protectively shields foster children from public view.

“Seeing Their Voices” pulls that veil partway back. While the photographers’ full names aren’t disclosed, we see their faces in the self-portraits they’ve taken and we read their words.

“Dad chose the wrong person over me,” says BMP in the biographical statement that accompanies his photos. “My mother doesn’t give a crap.” He does have a caring aunt who “takes me home places and takes me home and has stayed in touch with me since I was a little kid.” He has been living in his current foster home for two years, he said, making it one of his longest placements.

Jose, 17, says the instability and uncertainty of the foster care system has turned him into someone who doesn’t try to make friends anymore. “One day you have best friends in school,” he says in his the artist’s statement. “Then the next day you’re torn apart.”

Despite the many moves and upheavals he’s been through, Stephen, 18, strikes a note of appreciation for those who have tried to help him. “Foster parents may not be your real parents,” he says, “but they just might be the closest thing.”

Foster care to college

Devonne McLaughlin, 19, recently finished her first year at Westfield State College. (Now out of the foster care system and living in Springfield, McLaughlin agreed to be identified by name.)

“It gave me a good feeling,” said McLaughlin, as she talked about the photo project during a telephone interview. When you’re taking pictures, she said, you’re taking in everything around you. “You’re capturing each moment.”

One of McLaughlin’s most arresting pictures is a pensive close-up of her wide-eyed, toddler-age niece. She took that one, and others of her young nephew, “to show what’s important to me,” she said. Another captures a very different scene – the ominous sky and dark clouds that covered Springfield on the day the tornado hit. A self-portrait, also included in the exhibit, shows a dark-haired young woman with a smile that belies the life she’s led.

“I felt like I grew up too fast,” she said, “and I missed a lot – being part of a family, toys. Foster care is very hard. You lose a lot of friends and you feel like you don’t really belong anywhere.”

McLaughlin said she hopes the show will encourage people to get involved, for example as mentors to foster children.

“I had one when I was in the third grade,” she recalled. “She would pick me up and take me out to eat. We’d always get a book – she knew I loved to read.”

McLaughlin was 3 when her mother died. She lived with her father, a drug addict, and with various relatives before entering foster care at 6. She lived in five homes, attended four schools. She was adopted once, but the arrangement didn’t work out and she drifted again. She moved five times during the last two years of high school, worked nearly fulltime to support herself, and graduated.

Having made it to college, she wants to help others.

“I think I’ll be a great social worker,” she said, one who knows first-hand the troubles kids face.

On the road

To turn her hope of finding a way to put a public face on the foster care system, Lyons and her co-worker, Randee Laikind, turned first to Lou and Leslie Ekus of Montague. The Ekuses, longtime volunteers and supporters of Friends of Children, helped shape the exhibit’s concept and came up with the title of “Seeing Their Voices.”

Lyons and Laikind connected with artist Ani Rivera, director of Community Photo Access in Amherst, which offers photo-based arts programs, workshops and exhibits for teens, adults and professsionals who want to develop their skills.

Rivera suggested pulling together a group of young people interested in learning how to take pictures. Lyons and Laikind recruited the would-be photographers and Rivera provided the cameras and the coaching. At each session, the group shared the pictures they’d taken over the previous week, gave each other feedback and left with new assignments.

“They were totally into it,” Rivera said. Just the act of taking pictures often draws people out, he said, as their attention shifts from themselves to the world around them.

He, Lyons and Laikind have hopes for “Seeing Their Voices” that go far beyond its short stint in Amherst. After it closes there, they’d like to take it to several other locations in this area and to the Statehouse in Boston.

“I’d like to make sure the legislators don’t forget who these kids are,” Lyons said.

And after that?

Maybe on to other states, where, says Lyons, the foster care systems are generally plagued with the same problem of too few resources and too many children who need help. The idea would be to keep expanding the exhibit by adding stories and pictures from foster care children in other states.

Getting the show on the road will be a huge challenge that will require winning grants and donations totaling more than $500,000. That’s the cost of a specially outfitted tractor trailer – essentially a museum on wheels in which the vehicle itself houses the exhibit – that could take the stories of Devonne, Jose, BMP, and Stephen to locations around the country.

Museums on wheels offer the flexibility of showing exhibits almost anywhere, Lyons said – in a store parking lot, at a university, outside a state capitol building.

Yes, it’s an ambitious dream, as Lyons admits, but she’s looking at ways to raise the money and make it happen.

“We want to keep the focus on the needs of the kids,” she said. “We don’t want this to be a story that goes away.”

“Seeing Their Voices” is on view at the ETTA Gallery, 534 Main St., Amherst, through Thursday, hours are 5 to 8 p.m.

Suzanne Wilson can be reached at swilson@gazettenet.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friends of children & Community-Photo-Acces

CONTACT: Jane Lyons

Friends of Children

320 Riverside Drive

Northampton MA  01062

413-586-0011 (o)

413-584-7833 (f)

www.friendsofchildreninc.org

SEEING THEIR VOICES™ -  Growing Up in Foster Care

Northampton – Foster children are typically shielded from the public’s eye due to sensitive issues of confidentiality.  The nearly 800,000 children who experience foster care each year in America have most often been abused, neglected, or abandoned and move through life silently.  But one agency believes strongly that their voices must be heard in order to improve the child welfare system that has raised them.

Friends of Children, a nonprofit child advocacy agency, will preview their project called Seeing Their Voices™ which is a multimedia project about foster care told from the perspectives of the youth themselves.  With photography done by youth who are experiencing foster care and recordings of interviews telling their stories, it is hoped that the public will understand that everyone can make a difference in the lives of children.

SEEING THEIR VOICES™ was initiated as a child advocacy project of Friends of Children to give young people who have experienced foster care a vehicle to express themselves in a call-to-action to help change a system sorely in need of reform.

With words of despair, resilience, anger and dreams and photographic expression of what’s important in their lives, they will share what it means to be in foster care.  And with information provided by Friends of Children, the public will learn about the facts of foster care and how we can join with those experiencing it first hand to improve it.

Executive Director Jane Lyons stated, “It is so important for all of us to deeply understand that these kids need adults to care for them in so many different ways.  We have opportunities to help them succeed and we need to seize those.”  The organizers call this a preview as they expect to expand it to a touring exhibit that will travel throughout the United States.

The exhibit will be open Thursday, June 23^rd through Thursday June 30^th at ETTA-Community Photo Access Gallery, 534 Main Street in Amherst.  Weekday hours are from 5:00 – 8:00 P.M.  and 1:00 – 4:00 on the weekend.  The opening preview is on Thursday, June 23^rd from 5:30 – 7:00 and RSVP is requested.

-END-

Come to CPA and view photographs done by the Youth Action Coalition.

Community photo access is proud to sponsor this exhibit which brings together photography  done by middle and high school student in Ware, Easthampton and Amherst, Mass.

Community Photo Access has been busy developing relationships with community and business organizations and refining it’s mission. Since our last entry, we have been actively involved in a number of projects.

Working in coordination with a community non-profit organization, STAVROS – (STAVROS.org), we have been documenting, adding accession numbers, and photographing the art work of artist Ed Kwaitkowski . The aim  is to document and protect the art collection from further deterioration and preserve in folders and archival quality sleeves. As an artist who is relatively unknown but who’s body of work spans almost 60 years, Ed’s work is unique in a number of ways; His is a need to make art that represents the world around him, which for him is a daily challenge.Ed was born with Cerebral Palsy and has never had use of his hands. So when you look at the superior aesthetics, vision and expression caught in his art,  consider that all his work has been done with his right foot since he was 15 years old. To view some of Ed’s work, visit valleyartshare.com, and search for Ed or EK in the upper right corner (note: do not use the google search). Send Ed a message, he loves to hear from people since he rarely leaves his home. Ed, who is 73, has been helped by his sister Emily (age 85), most of his life. The project is being accomplished with the assistance of intern Abby Tuominen, a senior at Amherst Regional High School (thank you Abby!)

Working in collaboration with the Foster care center, Friends of Children, in Northampton, Mass, (friendsofchildren.org) CPA has been developing a national traveling exhibit that we will report more on as we develop and refine the exhibit-stay tune for more information on this important exhibit.

Ani Rivera, director of Community Photo Access, is currently showing in a group exhibit taking place at ACTV-in Amherst, Mass. The exhibit opens February 3rd, and will be up for two months. Contact ACTV for more information and hours.

Ani Rivera, President of Archival Matters, Inc.- the parent company of Community-Photo-Access, has been contracted by Umass, Amherst Museum of Contemporary Art, to upgrade and redesign its’ storage and preparation work areas. Working with the Director, Loretta Yarlow, Registrar Justin Griswald, and Exhibitions director Craig Allaben, the project includes revamping the entire storage areas, adding our Multi-Hanging Panel System, AMI Vertical Bins, as well as new work cabinets, work tables, and custom doors. With Ani’s 20+ years directly handling works of art for major museum collections, the project also includes re-storing the collection onto the hanging panels and bins.

Several special events for the Amherst Biennial, including the November ArtsWalk and the closing celebration on Dec. 5, 5 – 7 PM. We will be keeping East St. School open until 8 PM on Dec. 5, so come on down, enjoy Karen’s performance and celebrate this successful event. The Public Arts Commission will be serving beverages and light snacks for the Artswalk & closing Dec. 5.

Special Events!!!!
Oct. 30, Sunday,1 PM (weather permitting) Guided Tour by artist, Nancy
Winship Milliken of Pleiades ( her fleet of 20 foot sails on
Thisblebloom Farm). This incredible installation will be moving to the Swartz Family Farm on Rt. 116 week of Nov. 6th
and will be up until Dec. 5. The following weekend ( 12/11/10) we will
be relighting Shedding Light there with solar panels (we hope!).

Nov. 4, Amherst Arts Walk, Thurs. 5 - 8 PM. This is the only time all
5 galleries will be open at the same time!!

Nov. 6  Guided Tour: Terry Rooney, Curator will give a guided tour of
4 of the galleries (not Town Hall),  starts at  Hope & Feathers
Framing & Gallery, 319 Main St., Amherst at 2 PM.

Dec. 5, Closing reception  & performance 5 - 7 PM with special
performance by Karen Dolmanisth at the East St. School at 7 PM.

Artists may choose to talk about their work during the Nov. 6 guided tour.

Introduction to Lightroom(c) Workshop Lead by Tom Prutisto

Wed-Frid evening workshop: Participants bring their own laptop with wireless access and Lightroom downloaded in advance (30 day free trial offer)

Schedule: 3 session classes meet Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, from 6:30-8:30pm:

1st Session: October 27, October 28, October 29

2nd Session:November 10, November 11, November 12

Register by Oct. 24th

Class fee: $155.00

Workshop Details:

Lightroom is one of the answers to digital photography’s many challenges.”

It helps you organize, process, adjust, and output to print or the web. This easy to use interface is intuitive and thoughtfully designed to streamline working with single or multiple images.

In these classes, together we build a catalog of your images that is fast and easy to use. Each class is organized around one of the 5 Lightroom Modules: Library / Develop / Slideshow / Print / Web.

Successively, we explore:

-How to organize your existing images and what to do with the images you will make tomorrow.

-The power of Raw files and the speed of JPEG’s.

-The “digital darkroom” has never been more flexible than in the Develop Module.

-Presenting your work through slideshows.

-Printing with Lightroom templates and custom print packages.

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-The following are PC and Mac requirements for the class. Participants will be able to download a free 30 day trial of Adobe lightroom-3, for the class and are required to bring a laptop to the workshop with the software already downloaded.

Windows

-Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 processor or equivalent

-Microsoft (R) Windows(R) XP with Service Pack 3: Windows Vista)R)

-Home Premium, Business Ultimate, or Enterprise (32 bit and 64 bit): or Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit)

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CD-Rom drive

MAC OS

-Intel Processor

-Mac OS X V10.5 or v10.6

-2GB of RAM

-1GB of available hard-disk

-1,024 x 768 display

-CD-Rom drive

WordPress is an open source web development tool that allows users to create and manage their own web site. This class will offer WordPress fundementals that will allow you to design and upload your own images, products or other sources in order for you to gain confidence and the skills necessary to manage your own site. Workshop requires that you bring your own laptop with wireless access

WORDPRESS 101 For Teachers, students, artists, businessess

Monday evening workshop: Participants bring their own laptop with wireless access

Schedule: 3 session classes meet every  Monday evening,  from 6:30pm-8:30pm

Ist Session:  November 1, November 8, November 15

2nd Session: November 29, December 6, December 13

Register by Oct. 24th

Class fee: $155.00

Worshop Details: WordPress 101

• Hosting • Domain • Themes

How to install WordPress

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What are Themes

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What are plugins

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What are Keywords

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