Own Your Dream

Own Your Dream began in 2010, when Laniesha Merritt started putting on talent and fashion shows for Raleigh children aged 6 to 17 with no money, no materials, and no paid staff.

The shows turned out not to be the need. What the teenagers in them did not have was anywhere to talk about what was actually in front of them, and that made the rest hard to get to. So the programming grew a second half. On one side, cooking, photography, music production, and dance. On the other, tutoring, homework help, and STEM. The young people in it are called Dream Seekers.

Around that sit the Teen Summits and workshops, which take on gang involvement, drug use, unplanned pregnancy, and HIV — led in part by older youth and adults who came up through the same circumstances and found a way through. Being talked at by someone who has not been there is a short conversation; this is the longer one.

The work has kept widening as the need has. Mental health was added in 2018, substance use and housing in 2024, under the name Talk Solutions — which is open to anyone 16 and up in Wake County and the surrounding area, not only to the young people in the other programs.