"The Born This Way Foundation, founded by Grammy-award winner Lady Gaga, the South Jersey First Star Collaborative, a college readiness program for foster youth, funded by the Pascale Sykes Foundation, and the Give Something Back Foundation, which provides mentors and scholarships to help Pell Grant eligible students go to college, came together for the installation [...]
First Star Academy at Illinois State successfully completed its inaugural year on the campus of Illinois State University. First Star at Illinois State University is a college preparatory program for high school aged youth who receive foster care services. The program is administered through the Center for Child Welfare and Adoption Studies and led by Social Work faculty Deneca [...]
This report focuses on the summer residential element of the academy which ran from from 24th July to 19th August with students in residence for that whole period in St Mary’s University halls of residence on the main Strawberry Hill campus (unless time out was previously arranged, for example to accommodate a pre-arranged family holiday). [...]
The South Jersey First Star Collaborative introduced the First Star Academy at Rutgers University Camden at the First Star National Directors' Conference in February 2017. This marked the beginning of a partnership between national First Star, The First Star Academy at Rowan University, and the First Star Academy at Rutgers University Camden, where national [...]
The room is filled with possibility, and promise. Ten soon-to-be ninth-graders, members of the University of Miami’s inaugural First Star Academy, are being taught to envision a future most of them would never have thought possible, and to seize their own potential to make it happen. The instructor has scrawled a message on the white [...]
Throughout this past year, the efforts of the South Jersey First Star Collaborative have had an impact on both its local cohort of foster youth as well as national organizations and stakeholders who are committed to improving the issue of foster care systemically. The Pascale Sykes Foundation’s whole family approach has been essential in guiding [...]
