Shalita O’Neale, Founder and Executive Director of the Maryland Foster Youth Resource Center, is a former foster youth from Baltimore, Maryland where she spent 19 years collectively in kinship and foster care. She graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park with a BA in criminology in 2004 and is currently pursuing her Masters of Social Work at the University of Maryland Baltimore.

Shantel Randolph is the Director of Youth Advocacy at the Maryland Foster Youth Resource Center. She is also a former foster youth that aged-out of Baltimore City’s foster care system at the age of 21. In 2007, Shantel was awarded an Open Society Institute-Baltimore Community Fellowship to start work with Foster Youth Inc. In 2009, Shantel became the Director of Youth Advocacy at the Maryland Foster Youth Resource Center where the FYI program now operates.