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The mission of the Heart Gallery of Tampa Bay is to enable children living in foster care in our communities to realize their dream of finding permanent, loving adoptive families to call their own, and to raise awareness and education about the hundreds of children who desperately need and deserve the shelter and love of forever homes.
The Heart Gallery is a unique photographic exhibit created to find forever families for children in foster care. The touring exhibit specifically recruits for those who have had parental rights terminated and are in jeopardy of aging out of the foster care system due to the lack of recruitment efforts within the overloaded foster care system. Those at higher-risk are particularly difficult to find permanent placements for due to factors of race, age, sibling groups that desire to be adopted together, as well as special needs children who suffer from physical, emotional or mental challenges. On average, slightly more than 100 children are featured annually.
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The Heart Gallery Tampa Bay, a collaborative project of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County and Hillsborough Kids, Inc., was the first in the nation to feature both a sight and sound exhibit with audio messages from waiting children.
The idea for the Heart Gallery started at the suggestion of Santa Fe photographer and adoptive mother Cathy Maier Callanan, who with Diane Granito, a recruiter for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD), brought the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words" to life. It was there, in 2001, that the nation's first Heart Gallery was launched as a way to help New Mexico's "waiting children" step from the shadows into the light with dignity. Since that time, over 120 Heart Galleries (and growing) have been launched across the United States to increase the number of adoptive families for children needing homes in our communities.
Visit on line: www.heartgalleryofamerica.org
Champions of Heart Galleries nationwide include a collaboration of many people, many of whom are volunteers. Not the least of which are the countless professional photographers across the country who volunteer their time and talent to capture the true spirit of these special children, providing them with a chance for a better life.
The Heart Gallery has demonstrated unprecedented success in finding adoptive homes and is changing lives every day by giving a voice to America's forgotten children.
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