"Not Safe" for Teens (NSFT ) is an independent, not-for-profit, teen-led art, activism, and anti-censorship initiative. Our mission is to create safe spaces for teen artists to make and share art representative of their uncensored ideas, stories, feelings, dreams, and beliefs–including those that some deem “not safe” for youth to express or explore.

With the help of their mentor (Lorraine Ustaris, the organizer of this GoFundMe), the NSFT team is led by three BIPOC high school students and five additional teen curators. NSFT is proudly a teens-curate-teens art initiative.

NSFT received a 2025 Velocity Grant to support our work amplifying the art and ideas of teen creatives. The grant provided the team with $5,000 that will be used towards NSFT's second exhibition, which will open in November 2025 at Paulownia Projects in West Philadelphia.

However, to fully build out the teen curatorial board's vision for the exhibition and to continue our work together and community outreach, NSFT needs an additional $3,000 to start.

This year, the curatorial team is envisioning something bigger and bolder for the public. Like last year, the exhibition will display the open-call art of brave teen artists of all mediums from across the city. But central to this year's exhibition will be a large-scale, experiential, multimedia/projection-based installation that the curatorial team would like to create to represent the collective psyche of American teens and convey the cross-section of dreams and looming fears teens have for this country and for their own lives and communities.

NSFT's first show opened in June 2024 at iMPeRFeCT Gallery in Germantown featuring over 30 Philly youth artists. The teens in NSFT's first exhibition were from various areas of the Greater Philadelphia region, with the majority residing within city limits. They represented a diversity in gender, culture, ethnicity, and art mediums. The show featured fashion, music, poetry, dance performance, video, painting, sculpture, and more. The team estimates that the in-person events and workshops that NSFT produced last year were attended by at least one thousand people. This year, NSFT hopes to reach and include thousands more in our art-for-change initiative.

Here is an article covering NSFT's preparation for their first exhibition in 2024. Follow NSFT's work on Insta at not.safe.for.teens and learn about other ways to give or donate to their projects.

Your donations will cover things like:

Art supplies and installation and building materials

Snacks for the teen curatorial board

Workshop honorariums for teen/young adult resident teaching artists

Printing photography and art work

Outreach and promotional materials

Transportation

Prizes for youth artists who place in our exhibition

If you know teen creatives who might be interested showing their work or performing at our exhibition: this is our art submission form.

Thank you for supporting our teen artists and NSFT's community initiative. Follow our Instagram for updates: @not.safe.for.teens