Press Coverage

When you’ve spent your life inside of a kaleidoscope - twisted and churned until it felt like the air was being squeezed out of you - what do you do when you’re finally free to breathe?

When you’ve been abused or abandoned by the very people who gave you life, how do you find a way to open your heart and learn how to hope?

When you’ve been careening in and out of the lives of adults who never keep you around long enough to remain anything but strangers or enemies, what happens when you’re finally flung out for good, homeless, and you discover that concrete isn’t the hardest thing about the streets?

Read the entire story here: ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

The addict extended her hand. There were two $1 bills, enough for bus fare to a shelter for homeless teens.

“Call me when you get there,” she said.

That runaway, Angela, will be just one of dozens of young runaways and throwaways welcoming generous visitors to Covenant House Texas Saturday. With luck, hundreds of Houstonians will drop by the campus at 1111 Lovett bearing clothing, toiletries, bus cards, gift cards or baby items as a part of a national daylong event called “Do 1 Thing.”

Words help to explain the plight of the homeless teens, but Najlah Feanny Hicks, one of the masterminds of the project, believes photographs are more powerful still.

That’s why she’s enlisted the help of award-winning photojournalists to show the faces of teens at sites all over the country. Houston photographers include Smiley N. Pool of the Houston Chronicle and Dave Einsel, Robert Seale and Todd Spoth.

All day Saturday, their photos will be streaming online at do1thing.mediahive.com.

Angela, now 20, her friend Corderro and other young people from Houston should be easy to find on the Web site.

Aspirations

Corderro, 19, wants to be an actor, a pastry chef and a restaurateur. For the moment, though, he’s busing tables and making plans to enroll at Houston Community College.

If he seems an unlikely resident of Covenant House, he is not. “I used to run away when things didn’t go right,” Corderro said.

Hicks, a New York-based photographer who has donated hundreds of hours of her own time to the project, said that today, Valentine’s Day, 1.3 million young people are living on the streets or in shelters.

“We’re going to spend billions of dollars telling each other how much we care,” Hicks said. “Why not do one thing for someone, a young person, less fortunate than ourselves?”

Do 1 Thing is Hicks’ third campaign to help disadvantaged children through photography.

In 2005, she and a colleague enlisted the help of photographers to showcase several hundred foster children in New Jersey. Over time, 160 of those kids were adopted.

In 2007, Hicks organized a photography exhibit featuring 100 older children who faced the prospect of living in foster homes, group homes or shelters until they reached the age of maturity.

Every year, Hicks says, that happens to 25,000 young adults nationwide, and thousands of them wind up on the streets.

Do 1 Thing, she hopes, will get the public involved with young people like Angela and Corderro.

Inspirations

In his small dorm room at Covenant House, Corderro keeps pictures of his siblings, books by Donald Trump and President Barack Obama, and a pencil sketch of the president.

Corderro looks like a smaller, younger Obama, and Corderro, like Obama, was raised by his mom.

“I wish I could talk to him,” Corderro said wistfully. “I’d ask him for advice.”

In Angela’s dorm room are scrapbooks, photos of her little sister, and life-size plastic heads with lots of hair.

Future plans

In just a few weeks, Angela is going to start working on her beautician’s license, and one day she hopes to own her own beauty shop.

Her short life has been tough so far. But when she walks out of Covenant House, Angela sees downtown, skyscrapers and opportunities.

What’s important, she says, is not where you’ve been, but where you’re going.

claudia.feldman@chron.com

To view the chron.com photo gallery click here

While some of you will be out scrambling for flowers, cards or some other stand-in for your affection on Saturday, a new national non-profit group with ties to Maine is asking you to take a minute for them.

On Valentine’s Day Do 1 Thing is asking people around the country to break off from their regularly scheduled programming and think about helping the nation’s homeless teenage population.

So, yeah, drop the whole chocolates and naughty underwear bit for a minute.

Do 1 Thing is the brainchild of photographers and other journalists from around the country, trying to bring attention to a problem that sometimes gets little or no recognition. On Feb. 14, the project is kicking off as photographers around the country spread out to document the young people living just outside the margins, sometimes right in broad daylight. As the people behind Do 1 Thing point out, homelessness for young people can take many forms; it doesn’t just mean living on the streets, but sometimes couch-surfing from one friend’s place to another.

Unlike the adult homeless population, teens can have a different set of needs, including expanded medical and education services.

Around Maine, photographers, including students from The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies will be taking photos of homeless youth and giving the “A Day in the Life” treatment to people who are sometimes referred to as “falling in between the cracks.”

Alexandra Daley-Clark, director of photographer relations (or photographer wrangler as she says), says the idea was for people to use whatever resources and skills they have, writing, shooting photography or video, to draw people’s attention to the issue of teen homelessness.

Daley-Clark is a photographer with years of experience working for different publications, including Newsweek. She now lives in Saco and has her own studio, working on commercial photography as well as weddings and other events.

The Valentine’s Day push serves two purposes, documenting the issue of poverty and homelessness and using the results of that to get people motivated to act, she said. So even if you’re not a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, you can find a way to Do 1 Thing in your area, which can be something as easy as donating slightly used clothes, toiletries or non-perishable food to shelters and other aid groups.

Daley-Clark says it is just the beginning, as the Do 1 Thing project will continue to try and give a voice and face to the young homeless. While it may not seem like a lot, it can start to add up if enough people get involved.

Looking for ways to help, you can contact some of these agencies around Maine or find a shelter near you.

Portland: The Preble Street Resource Center

York County: Caring Unlimited

Franklin, Oxford and Androscoggin counties: Community Concepts

Just past the crack of dawn several days a week, Pim Van Hemmen can be seen running at a good clip through Fair Haven. But he’s running a little faster than usual these days as he heads back to his third-floor home office.

“I have a certain amount of anxiety about this,” he says. “For about an hour each day, I freak out that I’m not making any money for the first time in my life.”

He’s not making any money because he recently took a buyout from his 25-year employer, the rapidly shrinking Star-Ledger, where he headed the newsroom photo and online efforts, and hasn’t yet turned his full attention to a photography business he plans to launch.

And what’s keeping him from the startup is do1thing.mediahive.com, a national non-profit he co-founded to call attention to teenage homelessness.

Tomorrow, Valentine’s Day, dozens of Do1Thing professional photographers, videographers, writers and editors — including a passel of Pulitzer Prize winners — will fan out across America’s large cities looking to document, in images and words, the plight of kids who’ve been kicked to the curb.

One of the short videos on the Do1Thing site.

How does a surburban dad and husband go from a successful career in photojournalism to an all-consuming unpaid role as advocate for some of America’s neediest?

“It all started with the Heart Gallery project,” says Van Hemmen.

Founded by Van Hemmen and Najlah Feanny Hicks, a photographer for Newsweek and other newsmagazines, the Heart Gallery of New Jersey was a photography-based effort aimed at raising awareness of foster-children’s issues and boosting the adoptability of foster kids.

How? By a simple but transformative act: replacing the ugly mugshots used by the state agencies with photos that showed the kids as they really were.

Since 2005, the Heart Gallery has helped place 150 kids into permanent homes, says Van Hemmen. Many of them had spent their entire lives in the foster care system. Some were considered unadoptable.

“We think that the Heart Gallery helped to find them permanent homes and stable familes,” Van Hemmen says.

The success of that effort led Hicks and Van Hemmen to ponder what happens to foster kids who become young adults without being adopted.

Answer: they “age out” of the system, and are set loose into the world on their own.

Each year, 25,000 foster kids in America age out, and about a quarter of them end up on the streets, says Van Hemmen.

“It shouldn’t be that way,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Hicks and Van Hemmen decided to amp up the Heart Gallery approach. Wouldn’t it make sense, they asked, to have professional photographers take quality pictures to document and shine a light on an often overlooked problem?

In five months, Van Hemmen and Hick, recruited 100 top-notch photographers and other media pros in 20 cities across the country.

“We have 30 Pulitzer prize-winning photographers who have been and will be taking their best shots of homeless teens to show who they are and why they live the way they do” on Feb. 14, says Van Hemmen.

“Then we’ll put these pictures and videos on our interactive website so that people, everyone, can see their hardship and do something about it.”

Van Hemmen and Hicks partnered with Covenant House, the largest non-profit organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless teens through facilities in Newark, Atlantic City, New York and other cities across the country.

“What most of us don’t realize is that there are nearly a million teens and young adults out there in this country who are homeless — homeless,” says Van Hemmen. “The foster system takes care of them until they are 18, and then they age out, they’re on their own. They don’t have a support system. We can try to help them, and Covenant House will be the link for us.”

By coincidence, Covenant House’s new president is another Fair Haven resident, former New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services commissioner Kevin Ryan. He and Van Hemmen live just blocks apart, and each has a child in the nearby Sickles School, though the two men have only met in passing.

Ryan tells redbankgreen he’s “elated” that Hicks and Van Hemmen chose to focus on Covenant House’s work.

“Do1Thing is taking the most disempowered and voiceless kids and young adults — whether they’re living under the boardwalk in Atlantic City or in a box in public park or train station — and inviting the world to pay attention and do something about it,” he says.

“What they’re doing reminds me so much of what the Heart Gallery did: creating a moving portrait of kids using the gift of professional photography to depict our kids and help them get adopted by forever families.”

And what about that income Van Hemmen is supposed to be generating for his family? His wife, Jeanne-Marie, an attorney in Red Bank, is patient.

“Can we afford to do this, live on one salary? I don’t know,” she says. “But in the big picture, it’s really cool that someone, my husband, in the middle of a successful career, is stepping out and doing something more meaningful than making money.”

Do1Thing isn’t solely about the efforts of media professionals. Organizers hope many Americans will take notice of the teen homelessness issue.

Tomorrow, in particular, they’re hoping people will donate money or items that teens might need by bringing them to the organization’s Newark office. The public’s outreach will be documented in the photography and writing effort, says Van Hemmen.

Pictures and video taken tomorrow will be uploaded to the Do1Thing website. Updates will also be available on the group’s Facebook page.

This Valentine’s Day people across the nation will be teaming up to help homeless kids with the Do 1 Thing campaign, and some of the nation’s best photographers and journalists will be documenting it. The project is designed to raise awareness about the estimated 1.3 million young people who live on the streets or in shelters.

Here in Houston you can participate by bringing donations of toiletry items, bus cards, clothing or diapers to the Covenant House Texas at 1111 Lovett Blvd.
(Cash donations will also be accepted, which makes the activity less free, but not less gratifying.)

After you make your donation you can check out the coverage at do1thing.mediahive.com. (Checking out the coverage is guaranteed 100 percent free. Unless of course you then feel motivated to donate even more money.)

Do 1 Thing
Covenant House Texas
1111 Lovett Blvd
Saturday, Feb. 14
10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

~~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Black History Month, and there are lots of fun things for kids to do. This Saturday the Houston Public Library will be celebrating the Women of the Blues as part of their African American Traditions in Music presentation.

The Web site says the concert is geared for adults, but MomHouston believes appreciation for legendary singers such as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone can occur at any age.

Houston-native Tweed Smith, the woman singer in the band WAR, will be presenting.

Other library branches will be holding similar presentations with the music of African-American legends such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sam Cooke. Check the Web site for details and locations.

Candace and Solo stood outside the state’s only teen homeless shelter the other day huddled in the hope of better days to come and cold only in their resolve not to let circumstances get them down.

Down and out is a state of mind, not a condition of life, Candace keeps gently pointing out. “It’s not the thing, it’s how you look at the thing,” she says.

“This is the situation I’m in, but this situation is not me.”

Her dream, though admittedly still a few turns of better luck away, is being owner of a nice little restaurant. “Not that I’m a great cook, I’m not. I just want to own a nice place where people can come and eat and read poetry and leave full. And, oh, it would be in a much warmer state.”

Solo agrees, but he’s not talking about the weather, even thought being from Florida you’d think being 70 degrees below his normal outside operating temperature and 180 degrees off the course he had in mind is a factor.

“Life just throws you a curve sometimes,” he says with the sureness of someone who’s seen his share of beanballs. “And you just got to do what you have to do, so I’ve just stepped aside for a minute. But like David’s lost sheep, I’ll be back.”

The Old Testament reference is intentional and understood by Candace, his newest friend and the only person he trusts at the moment. Each recognized a genuine fellow traveler for more spirit and deeper meaning in life.

The chances of that are rarer than finding a sack full of money — and a lot more valuable in the long run.

“The fact of the matter is, no matter how tough things look,” Candace says, “if you’ve got someone to love you, who could ask for more. I don’t miss home, but I miss love, and I’m just glad that even if this is never a path I ever thought I would be on, I’m glad it crossed his.”

Despite the impending celebration of romantic love, the two are talking about something different. Something that Solo sums up as “that love that’s better, that comes from knowing someone has got your back.”

And minding your back and front and all sides is pretty much a full-time job, says Zach Bale, a Volunteers of America Utah staff member who looks after the shelter, 655 S. State, and its circulating occupants “who are all different, who are each more resilient than a dozen of us put together and who really just need to feel, maybe just for a few minutes every day or so, that they’re OK.”

To that end, photo journalists news and media outlets are setting Saturday aside as a Do1Thing campaign for arguably the most neglected homeless Americans — youth who have run away or been driven off and too often feel rejected by a system that seems to hurt as much as help.

“A lot of these kids have never had the security of being a kid being taken care of by parents,” Bale said. “So many don’t know how to take care of themselves. How can you if you’ve been abused by the people who are supposed to be your protectors?”

“Need is up 150 percent,” Bale said, noting that there are many “1 Things” people can do, chief among them is to visit the shelter on Saturday afternoon “and just find out what we’re doing and who we are.

“And, if you can’t think of a thing, we’ll happily provide you a copy of our wish list.”