The Issues Youth Aging Out of Foster Care and What is Being Done

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Angela Featherstone – model, actress, philanthropist: Founder of the organization Fosteringcare.org, a nonprofit trauma-healing and trade school for youth aging out of foster care in Los Angeles.

The school is contributing to halting the negative outcomes that so many youth who age out of foster care experience, including homelessness, incarceration, and human trafficking. Moreover, the school is also very importantly training young people in healing modalities, so that they leave school with a trade/occupation that will enable them to achieve self-sufficiency. They are now working with Jae Canas from UCLA Behavioral Sciences who is now creating a trauma-healing template from our paradigm for the Dept of Mental Health.

Who is Angela?

Within a year of emancipating herself from foster care at 17, Angela Featherstone became Canada’s top model when her September, Flare magazine cover broke all previous records for sales.

She quickly expanded upon her success and left for New York where she signed with the illustrious Click agency. She would travel the world as a top fashion model, working with such great photographers as Oliviero Toscani, Piero Gemelli, Irving Penn, Albert Watson, David Bailey, and Bruce Weber.

But for her life’s work of acting, she downplayed her striking features to play unlikely roles, emerging as an actress with exceptional versatility. She is best known for playing Chloe in Friends and the fiancé (Linda) who left Adam Sandler’s character (Robbie) at the altar in The Wedding Singer.

Most recently she played the role of Maggie on Showtime’s Ray Donovan and Jame on Girls for HBO. She has created sitcoms for Sony, DreamWorks, and NBC television, and written nonfiction for Time, Jane, Flare, The Huffington Post, Dame, and Zoomer.

Her essay about childhood trauma, God Said No, was published in the 2014 edition of Gargoyle Magazine and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2011, she curated Fuck Pretty, a show at the Robert Berman Gallery featuring important and emerging female photographers, and recorded “Coattail Glide” with Raymond Pettibon and the band The Niche Makers.

Angela, a committed advocate for children in foster care, volunteers with the Children’s Action Network curating their Heart Gallery from 2011- 2019 and served on their Winter Wonderland committee 2014 & 2015. She has also mentored a child in foster care through Kidsave from 2011-2020. In 2014, she lectured at the ICAN Nexus Conference; Violence Within the Home and its Effects on Children and continues to lecture and write about healing PTSD, child abuse, human trafficking, and intimacy. Her 2015 essay on child sex trafficking for DAME was picked up by Salon.org and MSN and exposed to over 7 million viewers. That year she was also an adjunct lecturer at the UCLA Professional Producing Program. 2022 marked her 14th year studying Moral and Spiritual Psychology with Rabbi Mordecai Finley, Ph.D.
Recently, Angela served as a consultant on the important documentary about the effects and healing of trauma, Cracked Up.