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@ miggymofongo
2024-11-18 01:44:33
**Hi everybody,**
My name is Miguel, and **I'm one of the board members of the International Foster Care Alliance (IFCA)!** I am **a former foster youth living in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.** I first connected with IFCA around 2016 when Miho brought a group of Japanese foster youth to Oakland, California, to receive community organizer training from California Youth Connection (CYC). At the time, I was studying in Oakland and organizing with my local CYC chapter. I applied for and was accepted for the trip to Japan for the Youth Summit in 2018 and have continued to stay involved ever since. As a board member, I help IFCA with its Arts and Culture programming as well as member engagement.
### My Voice, Our Story Upgrade
[My Voice, Our Story ](https://myvoiceourstory.org) is a bilingual blog started by IFCA youth to share stories and thoughts about common themes in foster care, such as aging out of care, normalcy, LGBTQIA+, mental health, and child welfare system reform. IFCA recently received a grant from Yakihonne to pay for six months of server space to upgrade this blog into our own social media network! Now, you can use any Nostr app on a web browser, iOS device, or Android device to connect to it and post your blogs for foster youth around the world to see.
Nostr is a social application protocol that enables our members to share their experiences from foster care on the My Voice, Our Story blog in a fun way. You can connect to the relay with any Nostr application to pull blogs and posts from our relay and, if you are a member of IFCA, post your own! Some Nostr applications have in-app translations that can translate posts to the language of your device, making it a good fit for our network that is spread out across different countries. Also, any youth who wish to remain anonymous can do so because you do not need to provide any personal identifying information to get started on Nostr.
Over the next few weeks, my fellow board members and I will host workshops to show everyone how it works. For now, you can [check out this short guide I wrote on how to connect to the relay by clicking here.](https://gist.github.com/miggymofongo/e09c1401d61e80634810389f2d4a490d).
You could always reach out to me by email [contact@miguelalmodo.com](mailto:contact@miguelalmodo.com) if you have any questions or want to schedule a time for onboarding and further explanation. It might seem complicated at first, but I am confident that our community will quickly adapt. Are you part of IFCA's network? Comment below with the country you are reading this from so other members can see!