Lucian Perkins, a photojournalist for The Washington Post, documented graduates of The Covenant House Artisans Woodworking Program, a career-training initiative that teaches homeless and at-risk youth fine woodworking. A local business in Washington, DC, hired some program graduates. Watch here to see how that worked out.
Nina Berman, a New-York based photojournalist, traveled to the Open Door Shelter in Chicago, Illinois, to photograph Jonathan Smith, 20, for Do1Thing.org .
Smith has been living at the shelter for several months. He grew up outside of Buffalo, New York in a household of alcoholism and abuse with several reports filed to the state’s child protection services by his school and neighbors. He left home at 16 and has had minimal contact with his family. He described his childhood as one that left him “emotionally and physically scarred.”
This presentation is a SoundSlides audio slideshow converted to video.
Judy DeHaas, a photojournalist at the Rocky Mountain News, documented the lives of a young couple for Do1Thing.org. Michael Cunningham, 20, and his girlfriend Lea Hallaway, 18, have been together for about a year. They stay from time to time at Urban Peak, a shelter for homeless youth in Denver. DeHaas tells Do1Thing.org:
Being homeless is difficult for the pair, but they strive to stay together and support each other.
Michael was taken from his alcoholic father when he was three-years-old and placed in at least 42 foster homes by the time he was emancipated in February 2008. His mother disappeared when he was around 3. After leaving foster care, he was unable to hold down a job and wound up on the streets.
His last foster home was with Lea’s aunt, where the couple met. Lea’s mother, a crack addict died when she was 6, and she was taken into the system at 2. After living in a series of foster homes, she was adopted, but Lea started to run away when she turned 13 and was asked to move out by the time she was 16.
The couple has slept on friend’s couches, in shelters and in cheap motels while trying to get a grip on their lives and stabilize, something neither of them learned from their parents or their brief stays in foster homes.
David Bergman used the
new Nikon D90 to produce his video doc on homeless teen “Perry”, as aspiring piano player in NYC. Go to David’s blog and read all about his work on the Do1Thing project.
http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/2009/01/09/will-you-do-1-thing-on-valentines-day/