First Place for Youth recently joined a half-day convening with UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) to explore how the entertainment industry can tell more meaningful, authentic stories about systems-impacted and opportunity youth.

Too often, young people in foster care are reduced to harmful stereotypes on screen, the “bad kid,” the “damaged” teen, the inevitable failure. These portrayals reinforce stigma and obscure the real systemic conditions, often tied to poverty, that bring families into contact with the child welfare system.

Through fireside chats with entertainment industry leaders and a hands-on storytelling workshop, our team explored how lived expertise can shape more accurate, humanizing portrayals, and why authentic representation and compelling storytelling aren’t opposing goals, they strengthen each other.

Our partnership with CSS is rooted in a simple belief: a young person’s time in foster care may be part of their story, but it should never be treated as the whole story.

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