For the past three years, I’ve volunteered to shoot portraits of kids for the Heart Gallery of Michigan. The Heart Gallery is a national effort that recruits photographers to shoot portraits of children awaiting adoption as a way of making these children more “real” to potential foster and adoptive families. There are now more than 100 Heart Galleries nationally. Often, Heart Galleries focus on older kids, sibling groups, or other “hard-to-adopt” kids. Ultimately, the goal is to raise awareness of the surprisingly large number of kids awaiting adoption and to increase the number of kids who are adopted into “forever homes.”
There are many state and community sponsored Heart Gallery projects. If you are a photographer, please do a quick search and see if there is a Heart Gallery project in your community. If so, please consider volunteering. It is an extraordinarily meaningful experience and a great way of giving back to a child and to your community.
For privacy reasons I am not able to post pictures from the gallery, but you can visit the Michigan Heart Gallery HERE
