Unaccompanied

The photographs, videos and paintings included in this project are all connected to a network of Unaccompanied Children shelters run by the human rights organization Heartland Alliance. Heartland Human Care Services works with the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) under the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to operate these shelters and care for hundreds of children in the Chicago area on any given day. These congregate living facilities house unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States without their parents. Having arrived in the U.S. alone, the federal government must care for these children until they can be reunited with their family or placed with a non-family sponsor. This process can take days, weeks or months, depending on the unique circumstances of each individual child. While they are in the care of Heartland Alliance, they live in one of five shelters in residential areas across Chicago’s North and South Side neighborhoods. In these spaces the kids live in dormitory style bedrooms, attend school and take part in extracurricular activities while they wait for their cases to be processed. Heartland provides for all the needs of the children including medical care and mental health services. None of this is to say that the lived experiences of these children are common or easy. On the contrary many of these children have experienced trauma on their journeys to the U.S. and living in one of these shelters is not where any child wishes to be. With this knowledge in mind the staff at Heartland’s UC shelters go to great lengths to care for these children with a trauma informed mindset. This includes maintaining strict confidentiality of all identifying information related to this uniquely vulnerable population. As such the works in this project focus on the spaces of the shelters, interviews of staff, objects the kids have made in extracurricular activities, the letters they have written to staff upon their departure and paintings made in collaboration with the children and Heartland staff. Through these different approaches, mediums and collaborations this project creates a space where the stories of UC shelter staff and children can be shared with the public while respecting and maintaining the necessary privacy of these children.