It’s so much a part of our world, our innate curiosity about people. We like to look at pictures of them! We like to take them and we like to look at them. It’s what we do as human beings that have this tool—the camera. it’s just so much a part of understanding the world that we have to negotiate with it. We have to figure it out.

“During that month,” he told me, “I would sit with families in their homes in Kibera for an hour or two, talking. And by the end of our conversation, they would have pulled out these amazing, old photographs from shoeboxes that they had never shown anybody outside of their own family. This documentation of the Nubian community was something that nobody had ever seen before. So the pieces of this project were already all there

“It’s grabbing everybody,” says Marcus Vega, a participant in the kNOw’s photography class in Fresno with artist Joseph Smooke. “Like when I come here, I get to escape from my daily life. It just cancels out everything. It’s like a whole new environment.”

The Municipal Dump in Phnom Penh was the scene of abject poverty and hardship. It closed its gates in 2009 but is this the end of the story, what has happened to the people who worked as scavengers on the dump. The new dump has been moved several miles outside of the city and NO scavenging is to be allowed.

In 2009, the founders of Collective Lens will travel to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to showcase the cultures, issues, and charitable organizations of third world countries. No matter where you live, there are many stereotypes and assumptions about other cultures that often prohibit one’s ability to make a personal connection. By showing the differences and similarities between cultures, we believe that more people will be encouraged to reach out to their neighbors across the globe.

People of colour in South Africa, through the apartheid years, had limited opportunity and access to formal education. Ukulapha was recently formed with the overall objective of facilitating the growth, development, and empowerment of previously disadvantaged and abused South African people.

Volunteers devote time and energy to help promote healthcare and education to the Nu ethnic group in China.