Do1Thing Blog

Covenant House resident Eddie White, 18,  relaxes on a couch that was donated to Covenant House Missouri February 14, 2009.

Eddie moved out of his home when he was 18 because of disputes with family members 2 weeks before he was to start he senior year of high school.  He spent these two weeks staying with various relatives and on the streets.  He spent the night before school started on the front steps of his school.  He started staying at Covenant House soon after school started.  He has plans for attending college in the fall for business administration.

Photographer Carmen Troesser donates her time to capture the spirit of homeless teens for the Do1Thing project.

It is the goal of Do1Thing to empower homeless youth to move themselves from homelessness to a permanent housing. Empowerment comes by outfitting the teens with training, items and supplies needed to overcome their current situations move forward.

http://do1thing.org

http://www.heartgallerynj.org

by Joe Perone/The Star-Ledger

Tuesday February 17, 2009, 12:06 PM

How did you spend your Valentine’s Day? Dinner and candlelight? Well, thousands of people across the country volunteered as part of Do1Thing, a New Jersey group that helps provide shelter for kids in trouble. We’ll show you a powerful video of one teen who was raped and beaten before she came to Covenant House in Newark.

Thousands of Volunteers

A second video by John Munson tells the story of a teen who has been living on the streets for months until she came to Covenant House. Listen to her struggle, and watch the transformation.

Have you guys been watching those awesome videos on the do1thing multimedia page?

Well, here’s the man who literally spent hundreds of hours editing video interviews and helping other photographers put their videos together. He edited images, produced videos, troubleshooted technical issues and was an all around great guy always willing to help anyone.

If you ever wondered if there’s still an old fashioned good guy out there? Well, we found one. THANK YOU Curt, Penn State and all the interns across the country.

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

It was a full house for the Program Presentation at The Covenant House in Newark NJ. We heard about the history of The Heart Gallery and how Do1Thing came to be. We saw the amazing videos posted on the site and got to hear the stories from the actual kids themselves. Miss New Jersey herself was here in the flesh signing autographs and supporting the cause. The kids were delighted to meet her. People young and old, from near and far gave their support, even the local girl scouts.

~SM

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 www.do1thing.org.

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

Kathleen O’Donnell-Pickert, 17,  is all blonde ambition – - to help homeless teens in Newark by giving them their prom night, a night that most of these kids never dreamed of having. Kathleen found out about Do 1 Thing because her parents donate to Covenant House and she knows Janette Scrozzo, the Outreach/Volunteer manager at CH. The more Kathleen learned about Covenant House, the more she wanted to help out. Luckily, she could also get her gold star scout award with Covenant House.

So Kathleen put up flyers at her school, Westfield High School in Westfield, NJ and at her church. She got 20 volunteers to help her put together the Covenant House Prom for 75 – 80 young people. She’s been overwhelmed with donations of gowns, tuxes, make up, nail polish, everything your average teen wants to look his or her best on prom night. There will be a dj, a buffet dinner and goodie bags for everyone. Kathleen’s dad will photograph everyone and each prom-goer will get his or her photo in a frame decorated with Valentine hearts.

What the attendees don’t know yet is that the New Jersey Nets have donated 4 tickets to a Nets game to each of the teens. Now that’s sweet!

The kids are certainly showing their Valentine’s Day Spirit in all the beautiful decorations around The Covenant House.

~SM