Hi! Welcome to The Voice of Youth in Care —the tenth annual Newsletter created by Halifax youth in care, former youth in care, and youth on income assistance. What makes it different is we talk about being in government care and how it really is—not how it looks from the outside. Some of us have started living on our own, but we're all youth who have lived in foster homes, group homes, with a relative, or in a supervised apartment.

This year, our group of about 12 teenagers, most living in small group homes or in foster care, met one evening a week through the school year. The 30 sessions focused on improving literacy and writing skills, communicating about emotions, working collaboratively on assignments, improving employability skills and media literacy. We invited in guests including musician Thom Swift, artist Laura MacNutt and youth advocate Amanda Sutherland to join us and share their stories and talents.

We wrote the articles and created the illustrations for this Newsletter between the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. It's about us and our experiences being in care (p.6 and p.7), Thinking about the bigger world (p. 9), Key Messages (p. 4), also Why we come to the Newsletter (p. 5), Poetry (p. 10 and 11), Dealing with the feeling (p. 12), and Music (p. 16). The Newsletter group attended a showing of the Oscar-winning film, The Blind Side. Many of the youth wrote their own reviews of the movie (p. 17).

But we don't just sit down and write articles and do drawings for the Newsletter. The Newsletter is just one part of the program. Click here to find out more about it.

We'd like to thank the Department of Community Services, Halifax District Office—Child Welfare, our Agency sponsor, and we'd also like to thank our generous funders: Department of Community Services, Department of Education, Halifax Region Children's Aid Foundation, the Halifax Youth Foundation and the United Way of Halifax District. All of you are making it possible for us to have a Voice!