Cinderella Camp: the first dance

LA's annual Cinderella Ball is the culmination of a two-week camp that teaches girls in foster care - often the victims of neglect and abuse - the skills and self-confidence they need to rebuild their lives. It may not guarantee a fairytale ending, Lucy Broadbent discovers, but it's a start. Photographs by Tierney Gearon
A warm July evening in Los Angeles. Violins are playing Rodgers and Hammerstein inside the Natural History Museum, and 28 nervous teenagers are preparing to make their entrance. First, the ladies-in-waiting, dressed in lilac; then, the debutantes in white gowns, gloves and tiaras, each of whom is presented to an audience of local dignitaries, charity donors and some of the girls' families.

This is the culmination of Cinderella Camp, a two-week residential programme that provides girls from foster care - with the worst possible tales of abuse, neglect and abandonment - with much-needed self-confidence and life skills, and an opportunity to feel special for the first time in their lives.
'Cinderella was a foster kid, really,' Kenadie Cobbin, 34, the founder of HerShe, the charity responsible for tonight's ball and a year-round mentoring programme, says. 'Her father had passed away, she was with her stepmother and stepsisters, and she wasn't treated very well, and that's these girls' story, too. And like Cinderella, they want to go to the ball. So we give them one.'
Rewind two weeks, and a yellow school bus arrives at Pepperdine University in Malibu, set between the Santa Monica mountains and the Pacific Ocean. The campus, regarded as one of the most beautiful in the country, is in sharp contrast to the squalid car-park in Compton, a suburb of LA and one of the most dangerous inner-city areas in America, where the girls had been picked up.