Peter Scarlet, Executive Director of the Tribeca Film Festival, agrees to premiere final films in the festival to a large and committed New York audience of 250,000 people.

Teens For BYkids, a youth-organized BYkids development program, is launched. High school junior Sophie Bressler initiates planning for a fundraising designer fashion show to be held on May 10, 2008, at the newly opened Times Center in NYC. Seventeen-year-old Ben Laflamme begins designing a BYkids shirt to be sold at his high school.

Board member Alan Murray, Executive Editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, hosts a fundraiser for 40 BYkids supporters. At the event, BYkids Founder and Executive Director Holly Carter announces that Neal Baer has the support of NBC Universal to make the first BYkids film into a full-length feature documentary. “There is so much here, it will make an incredible film,” says Neal.

We had a great day again. We call Alcides “Little Oprah,” because he shoots interviews at first behind the camera, then pulls up a chair and talks to people right on camera. His personality is lively; his questions direct and often suprisingly sharp. Alcides also interviewed a family of six AIDS orphans who live on their own. It’s heartbreaking, but these kids are resilient.

Neal Baer (Executive Producer of Law & Order: SVU) and Chris Zalla (2007 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner) leave for Mozambique to teach 16-year-old Alcides Soares the art of filmmaking. Shooting 37 hours of footage, Alcides chronicles his inspiring story – echoed by so many youth in his country – of life after losing both parents to AIDS. Actors Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni purchased the camera and sound equipment for this project. You can see the trailer at www.BYkids.org.

Actor and director, Campbell Scott agrees to be a Film Mentor in our second year. He says, “BYkids is a powerful and poignant idea. Film has always shown the capacity to be an important social, political and emotional tool – maybe never more so than when it is placed in the hands of the world’s youth, guided by some of our greatest documentarians. This is a formula that can only benefit everyone involved – the kids, their countries, the filmmakers, and most significantly, the audience.”

BYkids hosted a celebrity-studded cocktail party to introduce its first film project happening this August in Mozambique. Film mentors Neal Baer, Executive Director of Law & Order: SVU, and Chris Zalla, whose film Padre Nuestro won this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize, presented the upcoming Mozambique project. Fifty guests, including Gloria Reuben and Tonya Lewis Lee, gathered at The Thom Bar at 60 Thompson Street in New York to celebrate and support the initiative.

Alan Murray is assistant managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, author of the paper’s weekly Business column, and regular contributor to CNBC. He brings his passion for public policy and journalism to his post. “As a journalist, I’ve always believed well-told stories have the power to not only enlighten, but change the world. BYkids is an effort to harness that power.”

Dr. Neal Baer, Executive Director of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, joins the BYkids Board and agrees to serve as a Film Mentor in Mozambique this August.

The Canada-based Virginia Parker Foundation generously becomes the first foundation funder in support of international filmmaking.