Stage Your Voice participant Nadia - Residentie Orkest

"As a young person in an institution, not only do you have your own shit, you also get all the shit from young people around you. It's often total chaos."

- Nadia

From institution to institution

"When I was two weeks old, I was taken away from my mother by a social worker. She has a mild intellectual disability and there were a lot of problems in the family. That was the beginning of my life. Eventually, the first eighteen years played out under the watchful eye of Youth Care. My father was always completely out of the picture. Before I was eighteen I had moved thirteen times."

"With my foster mother I have good contact again now, she feels like a mother figure, but I didn't continue to live there. That didn't go well. In retrospect, I think it was also because I was already quite damaged by my difficult start. In my teenage years I saw so many institutions that I sometimes lost count and forgot institutions. Oh yes, I was there too!"

A safe home

"With my spoken word 'A Safe Home,' I want to share what I've seen and how not to do it. The core is that there should be more attention to the individual. At the fiercest place I was at - that location is now closed - almost everyone was derailed and we weren't getting the right example from the leadership. There were a lot of flex workers sitting in and out. They were only working anyway to keep the days running smoothly. Some employees you literally only saw once. Then you couldn't possibly build a bond. Let alone attention to talents or future prospects. As a young person with an unstable base, you have to discover where your happiness lies. Fortunately, I figured that out pretty quickly."

"I've been living on my own in The Hague since last year and I often realize: I'm not being lived, I can do what I want, make my own choices. That can be overwhelming sometimes. What will you do when everything is possible? I like so much. No idea where my path will take me, but music will always play a big role in my life anyway. Just like writing."

Follow Nadia's journey to the stage!

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Nadia (21) was two weeks old when she was taken away from her mother by a social worker. Before the age of eighteen she had lived at fourteen addresses. With her piano piece and spoken word 'A safe home' she wants to encourage young people in similar situations and make clear to government and institutions what she thinks should be done differently.