May is Foster Care Awareness month, and Genesis Hopeful Haven is making it a tradition to bring awareness to the needs of foster youth in the community.
Founder Fritzie Saintoiry started the organization four years ago. Raised in her aunt’s orphanage in Haiti, she knows first-hand the feeling of not having parents. Remembering the pain of her dormmates grieving the loss of their parents, she knew this was a huge area of need. In Chicago, she went on to get a master’s degree in social work and dedicated her life to serving foster youth.
After the death of her son, she wanted to turn her pain into purpose, so she searched for a way to move forward. She Googled the “worst foster care agency in the United States.” What came up? Florida.
A month later, she moved to Miami and started an organization in memory of her child, Genesis. Genesis Hopeful Haven was born with the goal of providing new beginnings for foster youth.
Genesis Hopeful Haven (GHH) has two housing programs. One home is structured to keep siblings together and another is for boys who have aged out of the foster care system — meaning, they’ve turned 18 and were never adopted or reunified with family. Genesis Hopeful Haven provides these youth with a home and resources to become successful.
They offer a Life Skills Training Summer Camp to foster youth in the community with the goal of preparing them to age out with necessary skills needed to achieve self-sufficiency. A more recent initiative is the Explorer Program, created to serve foster youth who have never traveled outside of the state of Florida. Imagine life without parents who would be there to share the valuable experience of travel with you? Last year, they took a group to Maine. This year, they will take six foster youth to the Grand Canyon.Despite successfully serving so many in the foster community, GHH recently suffered a massive budget cut and now is building efforts towards seeing recurring donors give monthly gifts.
