‘We Are the Change You Want to See’

[Editor’s note: This story was produced as part of Spotlight: Child Welfare, a collaborative journalism project that aims to improve reporting on the child ‘welfare’ system.]

Tarah Dowling is a student preparing to graduate from the visual arts program at Vancouver Island University, or VIU, but she wouldn’t have been able to go to school without the support of a program that waives tuition for former youth in care.

She first applied to VIU three years ago and saw there was a question on the application asking if students had been a former foster kid. At the time, she was denied funding under the province’s tuition waiver program as she already had an associate arts degree from a school in the United States.

“I was really bummed that I wasn’t going to be able to finish my BA,” she said.

Dowling took another job in Ontario when she got an email from the province that said she had been awarded $28,000 to attend school in B.C.

“I thought it was a hoax, and they were trying to steal my personal information,” she said.

Once Dowling confirmed the offer was genuine, she registered in classes at VIU and moved back to B.C. to finish her education.

“It's such an amazing opportunity, I feel like I would be foolish to not want to take advantage of that, considering how much I value education,” she said. “I’m going to be the first person in my family to get a post-secondary degree.”

Highlighting the voices of ‘fellow warriors’

While Dowling was in school, she would sometimes wonder who else in the school was accessing the tuition waiver program.

“When I get these emails about information on the program, I’d often wonder, ‘am I walking beside other people that have gone through foster homes, and are they on this program?’ I was just always really curious to know who else was on the program,” she said.

This sparked an idea for an art project featuring students at VIU who are former youth in care.

Dowling got in touch with the university’s financial aid office, who forwarded her call for students who wanted to participate in an art project featuring students who are former foster children.

“Within minutes I got responses from people, and to be honest, I cried. I felt like I was a part of something that was me,” she said, while choking back tears.

“What drives me to do what I do is that feeling of being alone. I think a lot of kids that went through foster homes don’t share their experience. They continuously live alone in their suffering.”

For her project Dowling spoke with and photographed 15 students, including herself, and printed the cyanotype photographs.

She also made an audio collection of the students’ voices talking about what it was like to be foster children that people can listen to as they view the photos.

“I thought that element was really important because I am an audiovisual person, so I love to have those two connected,” she said. “Because I'm also a filmmaker, I think it’s really important to share people's stories as they say them.”

None of the participants are identified by name in the collection, titled We Are the Change You Want to See, but a few stand out for Dowling.

One is a man who was a survivor of the ’60s scoop and was initially unsure if he wanted to participate. He is now in VIU’s Indigenous studies program.

“He's learning about his culture, and that’s incredibly inspiring because people aren’t only just going to school to learn a skillset,” Dowling said. “Sometimes you’re learning about your own culture.”

When Dowling first met him, she was thinking that she would include a word from each person that they identified with in the exhibit. He said his word was “warrior.”

When the two first met he greeted her as a “fellow warrior.”

“He instantly addressed that we had to overcome a lot to get to where we are,” she said.

More than a degree

According to statistics from the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills, 350 students have used the tuition waiver program at VIU and they have earned 115 credentials since 2017.

But for Dowling, there is value to going to school that is beyond getting a degree.

“It’s empowering for the person to feel like they did something for themselves. A lot of people don't really have an opportunity to progress in life very much because of their circumstances when they were younger,” she said. “Just getting yourself to school and saying I want this for myself, just giving yourself that permission to have good things.”

Connecting with other former youth in care was emotional for both Dowling and the participants.

“I would do pre-interviews with people before I shot them, just to understand their story a little bit,” she said. “We were sometimes holding back tears, there was just this eye contact and this knowingness that, ‘Hey, what you’ve been through, I’ve been through.’”

Some of the other students in the project had lived on the streets, which created barriers to applying for school and the tuition waiver program, such as the lack of a home address.

Dowling has never been homeless, but she started living in foster homes at the age of five due to her mother’s drug addiction and being in “a lot of very abusive relationships."

Her mother gave up custody of her at the age of 10 and Dowling put herself up for adoption at 12. She didn’t go through with adoption but said that she separated herself from her birth family “because I felt like I was letting them down and I wanted to get better.”

At the same time, Dowling said she really loved her mom and wanted to be part of her life even though she would disappear a lot “because she’d feel like she was hurting us from her addiction.”

After becoming an adult, Dowling was able to build a stronger connection with her mother and spent years filming her for a documentary film called To The Moon and Back that is in the final stages of editing.

One year, she lived in 11 different homes and attended nine different schools.

“That's why education was really important to me, because I felt like I didn’t get a fair shot of it when I was younger,” she said.

She also recalled the foster kids eating macaroni and cheese while her foster parents would eat steak dinners.

“It wasn’t because we asked for macaroni and cheese, it was because they would constantly use the money more for themselves and not for the kids.”

One of the things Dowling would like to see at VIU is a club for former youth in care.

“I wanted to create a club at the school for people with the tuition waiver program, so that there would be a community where we could share our experiences, or just to go and do things together,” she said.

“Because a lot of these students come from other places, they don’t have any support, they don't have friends, and they’re struggling.”

‘We Are the Change You Want to See’ is on display on the fifth floor of the Vancouver Island University library in Nanaimo until mid-April.

This story was originally published by The Discourse. Tell us what you think about the story.