by Arena Phaphilom

Does learning about photography make your life better? If you’re 18, and have already been homeless, and in foster care, and been through major family disintegration—does using a camera or participating in a photography program make some kind of tangible difference for you?

That’s the central question for a community based photographer, and the organization that works with him or her. And it’s a hard one to answer.

I wanted to know how programs that work toward such intangible goals as inspiration, engagement, and increased self-worth measure their success. Since I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Joseph Smooke and his community based photography program with Fresno’s “The kNOw,” I asked him about how he and his collaborator Mai Der Vang have handled evaluating their work.

This term, they tried a new system. They put together a list of questions that they asked in the middle of the program, and then asked very similar questions again at the end. They asked the questions both on paper and in a discussion. It turned out that asking the questions halfway through really contributed to the program in a way they hadn’t anticipated. The evaluation itself prompted the students to think a little more deeply about what they were doing, and why. For Joseph seeing that increased self awareness, even in the students who hadn’t engaged very much, was meaningful.

He told me, “In the final session that I did last week, I went around and I asked some of the evaluation questions. And some of the kids said, ‘You know what? I was just plain lazy, and I just didn’t do it.’ And they wouldn’t have said that a few months ago, and that was really cool.”

Of course, there were students who said the opposite as well. “Others talked about how inspiring the class was for them,” said Joseph, “and how in each session they got more energized and inspired by it. And you could see that in the work too.”

“We start each session by getting together in a room and going through all the photos. And that last session, the first couple I looked at, I was so disappointed. I almost told Mai Der, I’m just going to go back to San Francisco, because this [whole program] just didn’t do anything. But I kept looking at them, and then I saw the pictures from the kids who really did put in the time…Oh my God, it was so extraordinary! They really pushed, and they did amazing work. Just amazing work.”

The evaluations are also a chance to learn about the kids—how they are doing, what their lives are like. In this particular evaluation, one of the questions asked how kids’ families reacted to them taking pictures. Many of the students responded by saying that their families didn’t know they took pictures or were not interested in their images. On the one hand, at that age my parents didn’t know everything about me either. But on the other hand, whenever I had something tangible to show them, like a photograph I had made, I was eager to, and they always seemed interested. So if I were facilitating this workshop, that small bit of information would become a point of reference for me, a moment where I could understand a tiny bit more about how my students’ experiences differ from my own.

In the end, you can’t really know if this learning experience is the one that helps a student tip the scale toward happiness or success. But I think both community building and education are just a series of many modest revelations and connections. It seems to me that a good evaluation helps to demonstrate that these moments took place, and meant something to the people who experienced them.

Have you had experiences evaluating intangibles like this? I’d love to hear your perspective. Email me at eliza@photophilanthropy.org

Last weekend, I went to Tasmania! Oh man, that place is so cool. Talk about beautiful—whew! Ryan and I stayed in the guest-hut of a family that lives in a valley near Cygnet, south of Hobart. It was very tiny, made of sticks and stones, and surrounded by thumping wallabies at night. The milky way was so bright we barely recognized the sky at all.

Tasmania is a place that has been embroiled in socio-environmental controversies throughout the last few decades. I’ve mentioned Matthew Newton’s photographs of old-growth logging there, as well as Ricky Maynard’s gorgeous images about indigenous people, culture and conflicts in Tasmania.

During the weekend’s visit, my host, Peat, told me about another photographer who has had a major impact on the Tasmanian landscape, Peter Dombrovskis. I want to tell you the story that Peat told to me.

In the late 70’s, there was a movement to dam Australia’s last remaining wild river, the Franklin River, which runs through Tasmania. Now, if you aren’t already aware of these stats, Australia is a continent the size of the USA, with radically less water falling onto it or running through it. It has a population of 22 million, as opposed to the U.S.’s 300 million. Despite currently having the most water per person of any continent, that water is over-allocated (literally, more water has been allocated to different human uses than is available), leaving many of its aquatic ecosystems in distress—birds, fish, plants, trees and other animals that live in or around the rivers are dying off at a terrifying pace.

So the idea that the last remaining wild river on the entire continent (or near it, since Tasmania is an island off the southeastern coast of Australia) was about to be dammed inspired a huge backlash among the population.

A senator named Bob Brown began a campaign against the damn. And he asked a Tasmanian landscape photographer named Peter Dombrovskis to take a trip up the Franklin, and see if he could make some pictures. In the end, the campaign centered around a single photograph.

This image by Peter Dombrovskis became the cornerstone of a conservation movement in Australia. That movement gave rise to the Green Party, which has grown to become a major political force here. This picture galvanized protesters and public opinion, which eventually helped stop the dam from being built. How amazing is that?!

For some more info, I recommend watching this clip from “Wildness,” a film made about the campaign in 2002. There’s also a good summary on wikipedia, and an article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Once again, there are a lot of different answers to these questions, and they depend a lot on the specifics of the organization in question. Sometimes foundations are responsible for supporting organizations effectively. A grant will make a bigger impact if it isn’t just for a set of photographs, but also for the other elements of an effective advertising or awareness campaign. Sometimes it’s up to the organization to solicit pro bono contributions from professionals with the relevant skill sets. And sometimes it might be up to an individual–perhaps the photographer!–to put in place the other elements of a successful project so that their personal contribution is meaningful.

I had a great conversation this week with Burk Jackson, who has just started an organization called Creative Cares in Portland, OR, that deals with this very issue.

The idea is to create twin databases of people with skills to donate (photographers, videographers or video editors, graphic designers, web designers/developers, writers, art directors, public relations specialists, or project managers) and organizations with projects they need staffed. If you’re a “creative” you fill out this form. If you’re an organization, you apply here. Then Creative Cares matches up people and projects.

To me, this seems like a great system. PhotoPhilanthropy has been thinking through how to go about this as well. We’d love to hear your thoughts about what the best way to do this might be. (Or what’s wrong with other systems you’ve tried.)

Burk is a commercial photographer who took some time off last summer to spend with his kids, and ended up injuring his back and taking five months off. He got to thinking about what really motivated him, and the changes he wanted to make professionally.

He had done a little bit of work photographing for nonprofits, and he found it really exciting and satisfying. “The most amazing stories are out there,” he told me. “But the best work in the world is going unnoticed because no one is telling the story.”

Meanwhile, other people just weren’t sure how to get started. “I run into creatives and they want to give back, but they don’t know how,” Burk told me.

He also heard stories of photographers who had worked with nonprofits, but not seen any real gains come out of it. Some people had taken on long-term projects, only to have the staff suddenly turnover at the organization they worked with. New staff either threw away the images, didn’t know they were there, or didn’t see a way to use them. The photographers were discouraged.

Burk recognizes the importance of accountability on the part of a photographer—if you’ve solicited contributions for a photo project, you need to report on your progress to your donors. Burk recently raised $5,200 from friends and family to do a pro-bono project for a small nonprofit organization in Tanzania. He sent his supporters updates and photos, to let them know how he was spending their money. But the same is true of nonprofits as well. “There needs to be some accountability on the NGO side,” says Burk. “I thought there had to be a better way for creatives to connect with nonprofits and find funding,” while also being able to hold nonprofits accountable for doing something with the donations they (creatives) made.

Part of the reason images sometimes fall through the cracks is that organizations don’t have the rest of the marketing resources they need to use the pictures. You need to have strategists, writers, graphic designers—it takes a lot more to make an awareness campaign than a single photograph.

So who is filling this gap? Are there organizations out there, in addition to Creative Cares, providing this kind of marketing support or consulting to nonprofits? I’ve done a little research, and what follows is a list of leads (for individuals, for organizations, and even one for grantmakers). Please add more via the comments section, or email me with suggestions at eliza@photophilanthropy.org. (I especially need help with international resources—this list is heavily lopsided toward the U.S.)

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND COMMUNICATIONS

The Taproot Foundation is all about “doing it pro bono!” They assemble teams of professionals to assist nonprofits with their projects. And they post frequently on VolunteerMatch.

CommunicAid helps nonprofits with their branding and communications.

Lots of independent marketing or communications consultants will donate time to a project if approached.

And Encore Careers help match people with meaningful jobs to create social change.

TECHNOLOGY & SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANCE FOR NONPROFITS

TechSoup

Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN)

BLOSON

InfoXchange Australia

STRATEGIC RESOURCES FOR NONPROFITS

Many universities have groups that are reaching out to provide services to the local community. In the Bay Area, for example, the Stanford Alumni Consulting Team provides pro bono consultants to nonprofits.

Compass Point Nonprofit Services

The Conservation Company puts out papers and writeups on capacity and does consulting for nonprofits and foundations.

GEO: Grantmakers for Effective Organizations is a network for foundations and nonprofits to make grantmaking more realistic and effective. They have a great video about themselves.

FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

CreativeCares has the potential to become an auspicing organization for photographers, much like Blue Earth Alliance, so that a photographer can apply for grants in conjunction with a 501(c)3 organization. Since many foundations don’t want to fund individuals, but do want to fund the kinds of marketing and awareness raising projects that photographers are a part of, this is an excellent funding strategy to pursue.

Another matching service for photographers and nonprofits is Photographers for Charity.

Photographers who want to donate specific images to be sold on behalf of charitable organizations can do so via Photographers for Charity (same name as above, but different org) and Collect.Give.

Focus for Humanity has a $15,000 grant for a project done with an NGO. Submissions open September 1^st and close November 1^st, 2010.

International Guild of Visual Peacemakers is getting going—I just joined their newsletter to see what they’re about. (Incidentally, their facebook page seems to be working better than their website at the moment.)

FILMMAKING

Lights Camera Help specifically has a volunteer match as well, and their film festival runs July 29^th-August 2nd in Austin, TX.

COMMUNITY BASED PHOTOGRAPHY

PhotoVoice helps people create participatory photography programs to empower communities.

“I think you should tell everyone to get in touch with each other,” says Burk. If you’d like to contact him, please do so at burk@creativecares.org.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Well, YES! And no. I mean, of course! Except…sometimes not.

This is a complicated question.

From an organizational perspective, on the one hand you have a scenario like this: a large, international NGO with a significant marketing budget needs to make pictures to chronicle and advertise its work. It has a few different options.

1. It can hire a photographer.
2. It can work with volunteer photographers.
3. It can encourage its employees to also take photographs as a part of their work.

If you look at the International Rescue Committee, for example, they make use of all of these strategies.

On the other hand, you have a tiny organization based in a rural area, without access to technology, or sometimes even electricity. This organization has very limited ability to photograph itself, and very limited funds. This kind of organization has options as well:

1. No photography will be used in its work.
2. It can find a volunteer photographer.
3. It can fundraise, perhaps even with the photographer, in order to pay for the project.

And all organizations have a—perhaps inappropriate—mandate to keep their administrative costs much much lower than their program costs. I.e., donors these days seem to want the money they give to go “straight” to benefits for the clients, not to paying for the desks, equipment, marketing and employee salaries of the organization. That trend tends to put undue pressure on organizations’ marketing budgets to stay low, making them unable to hire a professional photographer. (For more on this problem, check out this paper called the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.)

Now let’s look at the photographers’ perspective.

Some photographers, as journalist Yves Choquette said in her comment to me on PhotoPhilanthropy’s Facebook page, have a day job. They are happy to volunteer their time, and don’t need to be paid. With the increasing popularity of photography around the world, the skill and knowledge about how to make pictures has increased. There are a lot of people who are not professional photographers who can make excellent images in the service of organizations.

There are also career photographers. Some call themselves artists, some call themselves journalists, but for all of them, photography is at the center of their professional identity. Those people need to make money, and they need to be valued. The society at large needs to recognize the importance of the work that they do, if they are going to be able to keep doing it.

However, the industry that has existed around photojournalists over the last few decades is shifting dramatically, as many industries are. I’ve written before about the music industry in relation to photography and the internet, because I think we are seeing successful journalists innovate, just like successful musicians.

One of these innovations is the NGO/journalist partnership, where the traditional client/service provider relationship is being replaced by a mutually beneficial partnership, in which money plays a slightly different role than it has in the past. I just read a fantastic summary of the rising trend of journalists collaborating with NGO’s to produce international news pieces, written by Kimberly Abbott on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab website. “The picture emerging,” Abbott writes, “is one of journalists who are trying to find new ways to tell important international stories and NGOs that are adapting to meet that need.”

She goes on to say, “An editorial red line the media would have considered completely taboo to cross just a few years ago might be more palatable today as the financial pressures on news organizations continue to mount. Similarly, an NGO offering time, staff or funding to help a news organization might have once seemed far outside of its mission, but today it is an important part of maintaining a voice in a competitive field and ensuring that stories that affect so many lives still reach U.S. audiences.”

There has been a big discussion amongst photojournalists this week on the Lightstalkers discussion board around how much photographers hired by NGO’s should charge. It’s a discussion worth having multiple times, because there is no one answer—it really depends on each specific scenario. The comments posted there strike me as level-headed and practical. I found them well worth reading—they helped me gain a sense of what my own work might be worth. I think both photographers and nonprofit representatives should read them.

PhotoPhilanthropy pursues a few different strategies for supporting photographers and nonprofits.

We help match up volunteer photographers who want to donate their time or design a partnership, and NGO’s with small or nonexistent marketing budgets. The goal is to draw attention to social issues that are going unnoticed. That work is not meant to replace existing media, nor is it an appropriate type of project for all photographers or all NGO’s. It’s simply one of many ways to go about telling stories.

PhotoPhilanthropy also gives grants to photographers who have been able to carry out these kinds of collaborations with NGO’s (whether paid or unpaid) in order to provide social and material support to those people who are trying to use photography to make a difference.

In my own photography, I take a different approach all together. As someone who fits in no conventional categories as a photographer, I actually create long-term partnerships with nonprofit organizations, and I fundraise on behalf of myself and the org.

The benefit to me is that the organization doesn’t control me, or my images, or how I tell the story I want to tell. However, I do want their collaboration, so part of our relationship or partnership agreement is to allow them to influence the project. That ends up benefiting me as well—I learn about the issue I’m covering by communicating effectively with the organization, and I’m forced to think more carefully about the impact my work has on the individuals I photograph.

Of course, the big down side to working like this is that the relationships I build and the fundraising I do don’t pay all my bills, only some of them. So, for now, I’m also a photographer with a “day job.”

Sometimes nonprofits hire photographers. Sometimes photographers volunteer for nonprofits. Sometimes the two entities create a partnership funded by a foundation. I think these are all valid, useful, socially beneficial ways for photographers and NGO’s to interact.

This morning, I caught up with James Chance, who has just won the Emerging Vision prize sponsored by Pictures of the Year International. He receives a $10,000 grant plus exhibition at the Annenberg Space for photography in Los Angeles, and the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. You can see his portfolio and his proposal here, which I found notable for the way in which it combined an arresting story idea with a nuanced approach and genuine emotion.

James told me he has been interested in people and their living environments for a long time. While traveling in Asia in 2007-8, he heard about Manila’s north cemetery, where it is estimated that 2000 people live amongst the graves. That struck him as a profoundly difficult and yet itriguing living environment, and he decided to explore it.

He visited the Philippines, and this cemetery, for a month in order to lay the groundwork for this project. “In contrast to cemeteries in the west,” he writes, “the North Cemetery is a busy and vibrant place. The vast and complex network of streets and alleys is tightly lined by tens of thousands of mausoleums and tombs – many of which are inhabited. Yet this is still a fully functioning cemetery, with up to 80 funerals taking place each day. The community here is strong and the stigma attached with inhabiting this location has allowed a unique ‘gated community’ to grow. Indeed, the resting place of the dead is the foundation that the living now depend upon.”

Although born in rural England and educated in Nottingham, Melbourne, and Ohio, he now lives with his wife in Colorado, where they run a small multimedia company that creates communications for nonprofits. After his masters, he meant to move to Las Vegas, “because the contrast between the lights of the strip and what was behind all that, the city, was fascinating to me,” he said. At the same time, he was offered an internship with the Columbus Dispatch, which he did instead, to try his hand at newspaper photography for a few years. In the end, he didn’t like it.

“I like to spend time with people and produce a longer story, over a period of time,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t like newspaper photography—spending fifteen minutes somewhere or with someone just to get a picture—that wasn’t the way I aspired to work.”

His wife Jessica started out as a strategic communications specialist for nonprofits, and one day she invited him to collaborate on a project she was doing at work. “At that point, we realized that our combined sill sets were very useful to nonprofits. So after doing that we decided we would set up a business to produce multimedia projects for the nonprofit sector,” he told me.

“Like a lot of photographers, it was necessary for me to diversify because the industry is shrinking. It’s also changing a lot, with all these new technologies emerging.”

So he and Jessica founded Chance Multimedia, and have worked with nonprofit clients ranging from Médecins Sans Frontières to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

When I congratulated him on this latest honor he said, “Most of all, I’m excited to get back there and continue the story.”

This was the inaugural year of the Emerging Vision Incentive, and PhotoPhilanthropy has collaborated with POYi by sending our own Awards Director, Kathleen Hennessy, to participate in the judging of the award. We will also be sending our student winner of this year’s Activist Award to the POYi conference in 2011.

PhotoPhilanthropy congratulates James Chance, and we look forward to seeing more images from the remarkable community he’ll be working with!

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

These are similar to the issues that the music industry has been confronting for over a decade now. The industry itself has been slow to respond, and, I think, pretty uncreative in its responses. However, a smattering of individual artists have developed really innovative solutions to the problem of how to make a living while also letting go of their work enough to let it spread. It’s only by letting go that huge audiences can experience their work, which ultimately builds their market.

In March the NPR show On The Media did a fantastic program on this topic within the music industry. They featured one artist in particular, Amanda Palmer, who has excelled at innovating around her marketability and with her fans. “Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer,” she tells producer Rick Karr. “The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.”

Her solutions have included t-shirt projects (one of which raised $19,000 in 10 hours through twitter, according to OTM), flash-mob concerts that utilize public spaces and ask for contributions from fans in person, and by maintaining a blog and a twitter account that allow fans to engage with her in her innovation process, as well as understand more about the real life of a musician (i.e. why artists need fans’ money in the first place).

It seems to me there are two main elements to this innovation process. 1) Eschewing what people won’t pay for, and figuring out what people WILL pay for. In the music industry, people don’t really want to buy cd’s any more, but they do want to buy tshirts. They want merch. Bands have become brands. 2) Merging with patterns, and leveraging social media. People are spending their time and money on interacting digitally—so Nine Inch Nails, famously radical in the way they interact with their fan base, (making online treasure hunts for example) has developed an iPhone app. Radiohead was one of the first bands to shift the responsibility, and the power, overtly to the fans by releasing their album online for free, and asking people to make a donation in an amount of their choice. People want to support the stuff (music, pictures, objects) they love, so if you stop manipulating them and acknowledge the power they have as fans, you can catalyze voluntary, genuine, at-scale support.

I think it’s time for photographers to start innovating in similar ways. Journalism itself is iterating, testing out new models like ProPublica, citizen journalism, and new digital formats. So what are photographers doing? (Please send me examples of innovators in this arena!)

One evening last spring, I had a friend who specializes in word-of-mouth-marketing tell me, “Eliza, I want to challenge you to make your images shareable on the web.” I had been asking him for advice, but I had not expected him to say this. At first I thought NO WAY.

But after a year of blogging, browsing, tweeting and generally engaging with photography on the web in a new way, I think he is absolutely right. One of the best things photographers can do for themselves is to build an audience, and you can’t build a large audience right now without using the internet. I don’t lose anything from a) putting my images online, and b) putting them under a Creative Commons license. Even without that symbol, anyone can repost my images anyway, citing the fair use policy (which I agree with—we need cultural commentators just like we need artists).

It’s not as if I can make money from those images when they are 72 dpi anyway. Perhaps in a print format—either as fine art prints, or as printable files for editorial content—but my images on the web are not at a size where someone can print them nicely (or, not the way I print them, anyway!). And helping my images get spread around the web basically acts as free advertising on my behalf. It only helps me. By putting them under Creative Commons, I become an active participant in cultural change, rather than impotently fighting the inevitable. I become someone who is using the strengths of the internet to my own advantage. In a way, I regain control by giving up control. And I acknowledge the immense creative power that lies in building upon the work of others, which we do all the time.

A Developing Story has just launched a campaign that builds upon this same idea. They are asking why awareness campaigns, designed to save lives through health education, can’t be put under a creative commons license so that humanitarians, doctors, social workers and volunteers can have materials constantly available to them in the work that they do. It’s an interesting question.

All images in this post are licensed as Creative Commons on Flickr.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

You can lie to the sun, but you cannot lie to the rain.

-Haitian saying

Place du Marron Inconu, says a lot about Haiti today.  This powerful monument to the end of slavery is surrounded by tents and shacks, and stands in front of the crumbled White House, The Haitian Central Government’s offices. The living conditions are dismal, with rains coming almost daily, meaning that people to stand all night because of the water in their homes. There is no place to go; and those with concrete floors are considered lucky.  Blue tarps are everywhere, and protect people from the heat of the sun, but when it rains water is everywhere. This is hard to see, and the stories are difficult to process; it is hard to rationally juxtapose a thriving social square with the masses of humanity now living there.

The Place de Marron Camp mainly consists of people who lived in nearby neighborhoods, and  are now living in tents and squalor. The number has continued to grow, indicating that indigents from other slums in the city are coming here as well for food and water. Not everyone lived in homes before the quake; making it difficult to discern the chronically homeless from the recently displaced.

The water situation is a perfect case study for the complexity of delivering  continuing aid: The government decided to stop the free water delivery since  it was impacting the market for the private water delivery services (here the government has not assumed the responsibility of providing water to the people).  Now many people are continuing without work and are not able to pay for the water. Mercy Corps has established a program of water vouchers for people, trade-able at local private vendors, which is a good solution. But there are so many displaced persons–the number is now estimated at 1.5m–that every problem is magnified, and every solution dwarfed. The contrast between macroeconomic solutions and basic daily human need  is complex and immediate.

At Place de Marron Camp there is a strong sense of both supportive camaraderie and angry desperation. Preparation for the Monday protest again President Preval was ongoing, with angry demands for work, food, solutions.  The leadership and response vacuum from the central government continues, and despair and anger are mounting.

I am in Haiti for a week as a student PhotoPhilanthropist to do a shoot with MercyCorps, shooting images of their relief projects as well as general pictures around Haiti in order to help them tell their story.

On our first day walking the camp at the Champs de Mar, across the street from the National Palace, we were constantly being beckoned into  homes by people wanting their stories to be heard. As I ducked into this house I spotted a shard of mirror which I used to take a portrait of this woman while showing as best I could her living situation at the same time.

This photo was taken on the Champs de Mar.

After an evening of shooting in downtown Port au Prince we were headed back when we passed a large pile of garbage burning by the side of the road. I quickly hopped out to take a few photos of the flames.

We woke up early the next day to visit the marketplaces as they were being set up downtown. After passing stalls selling rice, shoes, flowers, or fruits, we came up to one that really caught my eye. There were full of all kinds of birds: turkeys, chickens, doves, geese. These doves, which were displayed out in front of the others, posed perfectly for the picture.

We visited this school on our second day in Haiti. Mercy Corps is working with the Fist Lady of Haiti to support getting kids back into school; in this case, they are using school buses as classroms for art.

On our way out to the coastal town of Jacmél, we made what was meant to be a quick stop in the town of Leogáne, one of the towns closest to the epicenter. Leogáne is not a large town, and 90% of it’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed by the quake. As we explored an old manor that had been hit hard, we noticed an old barn sitting behind it that remained more or less intact. This man welcomed us in and told us of the history of place. They had used the area, the barn and two houses (only half of one still standing) to run a coffee business. In the barn we could still see scales and other tools. Before we left he agreed to let us take a few portraits of him.

Before leaving Leogáne we decided to make another quick stop at the beach to see how the Haitians were enjoying their holiday (May 18th is Flag Day). As we walked out to the beach we were welcomed by the sight of many huge boats up on the shore, in the process of being repaired. These ships made for great props as a few children and I climbed all over them.

We got an early morning start today and headed out to the streets of Jacmél at 5:30am. Starting at the markets in downtown, I slowly began to make my way down to the beach, were the rains from the previous night had full of puddles of all sizes.

I asked Maria Valdez what she likes to write about. “Well, I write poetry. And I write about the system. The CPS[1] system. Because I’ve been in and out of it a lot,” she said. “And I write about my mom. Because she passed away when I was two years old.”

“I tend to want more than I have,” she said. “But I think taking pictures I’ve learned that what I have is enough, you know? When I go around and take pictures, it’s like, ‘Look at everything that I live on and everything that I have!’”

That statement startled me—how true it is! Sometimes, looking is having—that’s why we love pictures so much, because they give us experiences, relationships and objects. They help our imaginations stretch father.

“There are some things that you can’t change with photography,” she told me. “But what you can change is the littering, the trash…everything that you can see. Like graffiti.”

I asked Marcus Vega what impact he sees photography as having on the group of students as a whole. “It’s grabbing everybody,” he told me.

“Like when I come here, I get to escape from my daily life,” Marcus said. “It just cancels out everything. It’s like a whole new environment.

“With photography, it adds on to the tools that I’m equipped with to tell my story and what it is that I see around me. It’s another outlet.”

One of the questions I had for the students was how they thought the program impacts their community as a whole. Each of them told me that the kNOw’s program helps people learn more about what’s happening all around them.

Marcus said, “With the kNOw, basically, what we’re doing is we’re informing the community about what’s going on. Because everyone’s off doing their own thing. And it’s good to see someone else’s side of it. It offers a whole different perspective, a whole different view. Like what people usually ignore–it gives them a chance to sit back and really see it.”

This kind of work also builds relationships. Miguel Martinez described how people will come up to him and say, “You write for the kNOw?!” or “I saw your article!” In a way, it gives people permission to talk to each other, and to talk to each other about difficult and meaningful issues.

Jaleesa Vickers has written some incredibly challenging pieces about her experiences, including essays on self-harm, racism, depression and bisexuality. When I asked her about what kind of reaction she’s gotten to her work, she said, “For the articles that I’ve been writing, because they’ve been so personal, usually it’s been shock. But I kind of like that reaction from people, because it gets them to think.”

She approaches photography with the same mentality. “Just like writing, I like to get people to think. To think about what I’m taking pictures of—usually, my community: what it needs, what has happened to it.”

And the benefit? “I think what we’re doing just gives other people a greater sense of community,” said Jaleesa. “Because they’re so wrapped up in their own lives, what we do helps them know what’s going on around them, if they don’t have the time to see that. I think that’s the major benefit from doing all this.”

There are great images in the world. There are pictures that move you to tears, or to joy, or that seem to lift you up. But community-based-photography recognizes that there is another beautiful aspect to photography—that the process of making pictures builds relationships and makes people happier. You don’t have to be a famous photographer for your pictures to be powerful. And whether it’s used in communities that are strong or communities that are struggling, photography is a remarkable tool for bringing people together.

Says Miguel Martinez, “It’s just a real interesting, fun thing, taking pictures. I really cannot put it into words. When you get one good shot, you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m going to keep going.’”

In case you missed it last week, here is a slideshow of a few of the kNOw’s photos for 2010.

Thank you Jaleesa Vickers, Marcus Vega, Maria Valdez and Miguel Martinez for talking with me!

As always the kid at PIO school are happy to see visitors, especially visitors than offer them help and friendship.

The day was very hot and the visitors were obviously not used to this intense heat, as their accompanying teacher told me, ” they are used to learning in controlled air-conditioned classrooms, this will certainly be a good learning experience for them and open their eyes to how difficult it can be for some people to get an education”. After a tour the school and its facilities the kids started to play games, a favourit pastime for all kids and one that seems to overcome boundaries of language and race. One of the Young people took up the task of organizing games and what a great job she did and great time was had by all.

The Afternoon ended with the children from PIO giving a display of Apsara dancing for the visitors. The children at PIO always look forward to receiving visitors to their school and the experience always seems to be positive for both visitors and the children of PIO School.