Introduction to Umlaut Foundation

ALEX CHIN [0:00] Hello listeners, and welcome to a podcast we hope will become a fun and informative resource for you. This is the beginning of an auditory journey that we hope you will find meaningful. 

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ALEX CHIN [0:21] I’m Alex, the shadow Brand Ambassador for the Umlaut Foundation. Umlaut is a student-run, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing educational resources for foster children and supporting their academic goals. We spread awareness and inform our audience on the welfare experience and encourage our community to help out. We offer cost-free tutoring in school subjects, standardized testing, extracurriculars (like art, music, or foreign languages), and more to middle school and high school foster and kinship youth. Any Californian highschoolers are open to sign up to tutor for us! 

This is the first of several episodes yet to come and today we're just here to provide a brief overview of our organization. For a little background info: The name Umlaut was inspired by the germanic mark “umlaut.” It is an accent used for vowels that shifts their quality. It’s purpose is generally to modify vowels into harmony with the other letters, if you were wondering. It also makes for a friendly logo (it’s a smiley face), and has made for some fun slogans, like for this podcast: a sound made for Ü (you can imagine the two dots on the u).

Let’s dig a little deeper into this foundation and what we handle though. We, here at Umlaut, understand the struggles that foster youth undergo through the foster system and want to provide academic support to lessen the burden of their stress. For example, several studies and articles from uhhospitals.org, The New York Times, and Fox News have shown that moving is one of the most stressful things someone can go through, alongside death and divorce, and is linked to anxiety and worry. Foster children are relocated a minimum of 2 times within the first 12 months of them being initially placed into the system. They deal with the pressures of constantly moving right off the bat, never knowing when they will be forced to relocate again. They also have to get to know different host families and try to fit in at a variety of schools. Another statistic you may not know is that more than 1/10 children who are placed into a permanent setting outside of foster care will re-enter the system within a year, or that 1/5 foster children will instantly become homeless upon reaching the age of 18, as they age out of the foster system without a home to return to. 

It’s things like this that drive us to help the foster youth community and what will hopefully inspire you too as well. If you want to find out more information on the foster community and the work that we, at Umlaut, are doing to help, or if you want to join our team, check out our social media pages (@umlautfoundation on Instagram and LinkedIn) and our website, umlautfoundation.com. If you’re interested in reading up on our sources, please find them on our website, or contact us at umlautfoundation@gmail.com if you have any questions or suggestions for our podcast. 

Thank you for joining us today. I know it’s a little short but believe us when we say we are just getting started. We look forward to interviewing former-foster youth on their experiences and other endeavors, so keep an eye out for future episodes. Thank you for tuning in, remember to check us out on instagram and linkedin @umlautfoundation and have a wonderful rest of your day! 

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