Contents

What is 'Zoom-In'?
PhotoVoice
Gathering a Team
The Workshops
Taking the Photos
Displaying the Photos
Workshop Exercises

What is 'Zoom-In'?
During the first half of 2008, New England Network for Child, Youth & Family Services (NEN) launched Youth ImPact Windham County, a collaborative efforts that brings youth services providers and the local faith community together to improve opportunities for young people in the county. The initiative is federally funded and is one of three such county-wide projects NEN is leading in New England.

In order to inform the coalition partners about needs of young people in the county, NEN set out to find out the people, places, and activities that youth found helpful or encouraging in their communities; the people, places and activities that troubled or upset them; and what youth thought their communities could do to improve life for them and their peers. We first administered an online survey to 213 young people between the ages of 15 and 21 in the four regions of the county. To augment the survey, NEN then coordinated a photography projectthat asked youth to express their thoughts about their community through pictures.

This two-pronged project, called Zoom-In, aimed not only to guide coalition partners but to raise community awareness of the issues young people faced in their community.

PhotoVoice
During May and June of 2008, we asked a group adult sponsors to gather young people from different areas of the county to consider and then reveal through pictures the everyday realities that both support youth in the community and discourage or drag them down. Called 'PhotoVoice,' this technique of gathering information and expressing opinion has been used all over the world, by many different groups, usually as a way of raising community awareness and promoting positive change. By entrusting cameras to young people to enable them to act as recorders, we hoped that young people themselves would directly relate their own reality, informing the community around them about what the world looks like from their perspective.

Gathering a Team
To begin the process, NEN hired a photography teacher at a local charter school who had both an interest in the project and access to cameras and photo-editing equipment. NEN then gathered a group of area youth-serving professionals and volunteers to serve as adult sponsors of the project. Each adult represented a geographic area of the county, and was asked to select 3-5 young people for participation in the project. Specifically, they were asked to invite youth they personally knew; who seemed fairly representative of other youth people in the community; who felt motivated to communicate with others about our overall question; and who could attend two workshops and care for expensive equipment. Each adult sponsor would be loaned a camera and expected to coordinate the use of the camera for each of the participants he or she sponsored, as well as offer support for problems or questions that might arise.

The Workshops
The group would attend an initial training workshop, break for two weeks to take the photos, then meet again for a photo selection and editing session.

Workshop I was two hours long, though it probably should have been at least an hour longer. With the help of an adult facilitator, the group focused on four goals: understanding the goals of the project; brainstorming the kind of messages that each person and regional team might want to communicate; learning how to use the equipment; and honing the art of visually capturing ideas through photographs.

Workshop II took four hours, and in it we selected, edited, and wrote captions for the photos that would appear in the final exhibit. Each participant sorted through the 10-20 pictures he or she had brought to the workshop, and selected the 3-5 that best told their story. We left the second workshop with about 500 pictures total to be used for various projects, 30 captioned photos which could be printed for gallery use or other displays and 4 display boards with the captioned photos that represented each region.

Taking the Photos
We sent the teams out with a set of basic ground rules and instructions. Each team had one camera that was rotated among its members. The adult team leaders were given their own list of tips. They provided general supervision, made sure each young person got at least two days with the camera, and tried to ensure (with only partial success) that each team member made it back to the all-important editing workshop. Some youth went out alone with their cameras; others went in groups. PhotoVoice projects in urban areas would want to think carefully about youth safety issues.

Displaying the Photos
We used the photos in several ways. They illustrated 'Lots More Positive Attitude,' the final report of the survey findings; a select group of photos became a travelling exhibit at galleries and other public spaces in the county; that core group of photos and a few extras were posted in a slideshow on the Youth ImPact website; and a multimedia presentation featuring the photos and the survey findings was delivered to groups around the county. Grouops included the regional planning board, a local homeless shelter, and a local prevention coalition. These audiences have not only been thoughtful in how to use this data to guide their work, but have given our coalition some great suggestions on what projects are needed.

Lessons Learned
One of our best decisions was recruiting adult sponsors. They were not only were essential in recruiting appropriate youth (youth who might have something to say, who could be trusted with an expensive camera and who could devote two full days to the project). The photography teacher we hired to lead the two workshops was experienced in both the technical aspects of photography but also in helping young people look for scenes that represented their thoughts and ideas.

Some mistakes we made included timing. We were determined to conduct the project during the school year so that if they wished, students could take photos of school life. Because of various scheduling difficulties, however, the project was pushed to the very end of the calendar year, right before graduation, which led to time crunches for the young people that we hadn't anticipated. workshops. Finding a less demanding time of year for our participants would have been helpful.

Though short workshop lengths helped us recruit participants and make the process efficient, we could have benefitted from more time. Two five-hour workshops would have enabled us to avoid some confusion that occurred because of our inability to completely clarify complicated concepts as well as logistics.

In order to insure that as many pictures as possible are thoughtfully considered and to help students create captions during the second workshop, we wish we would have required photographers to write a brief journal entry for each picture with rationale about how it got chosen and a description of how it shows a supportive or unsupportive part of the photographer's life.

Finally, though learning the skills of using a camera and editing pictures on cutting edge computer equipment proved to be a fairly easy challenge for our participants, mastering the skills of finding visual subjects to represent the answers to questions about "what supports you" and "what drags you down" in the community was harder. Though we certainly had some success facilitating Learning tasks that accomplished that goal through the activities described below, there remained some confusion about the connection between the pictures taken, their answers to the above questions, and their ability to provide captions that described their meaning. Some of that confusion, we believe, was inherent in the process and probably cannot be avoided, given the somewhat abstract nature of the assignment and the developmental stage of the youth participants. But some was due to our failure to continually focus the groups' thoughts on the questions at hand.

Workshop Exercises
Below are training activities we either did with our photovoice team, or wish we had done. It would be impossible to do all of them, but considering doing one or two from each category.

Honing Our Message

It is critical that young people leave this workshop understanding how to capture images in their community that represent things that support them or discourage them.

Say: The purpose of this project is to reveal the everyday that both support and youth in the community and the realities that drag them down. You are being asked to create a portrait of what life if like for you in the place you live. We are going to share these photos with people who will be moved to learn the answer to our question, who make plans to improve those conditions with money and volunteer efforts and more…. YOU will create a guide for them.

Activity 1: Who is in the room. Participants are asked to stand and identify themselves with various identities: age, area, gender, economic situation, type of neighborhood, family connections, community involvement, etc. The facilitator processes by asking about similarities and differences among us.

Activity 2: Graffiti. To begin to think about these questions, each team, with its adult advisor, gets a marker and a newsprint with the same question on it, "What are the things that support you and drag you down where you live?" Each team will draw or write "graffiti" on their paper for three to five minutes. All members write at once, with no adults joining in. At the end of three to five minutes, each group will stop writing and exchange papers for the next three to five minutes. Repeat until all groups have had a chance to write graffiti on all the papers. Return papers to their original teams and allow the members time to read the graffiti and discuss similarities and differences in what people wrote as well. Ask each team to prioritize a list of 5-10 words that most effectively describe the supportive and unsupportive nature of their community.

Activity 3: Each team lists the name of 10 things in their community — people, places, businesses, cultural activities, schools, service providers, etc., — that elaborate on the words and drawings on their graffiti wall. For example, one of the teams in our group said the physical condition of downtown was depressing. After thinking about it, he decided he could illustrate this by taking a photo of a particular building that had been gutted by fire more than a year ago, but was still standing unrepaired.

Activity 4: Learn from other Photovoice Projects. Look at sample pictures of other photovoice efforts (pictures with captions) in the packet. Ask students to describe what the picture with its caption are communicating. Have them answer the question, "What power do theses photos have to make change?"

Activity 5: These pictures can make a difference. Ask the entire group to brainstorm about the type of people who could benefit from seeing their photos and captions, once they are produced. (The answers might be police, school boards, employers in town, teachers, parents, etc. Have the group discuss what the people or groups on their list could do with this new information.

Activity 6: Taking the Photos and Writing the Rationale. The group breaks for two weeks. During that team, each team takes its photos.Students will document in a journal all the pictures that they took and write a couple sentences describing their rationale for taking that picture and what it might say about what it describes.

Activity 7: Students choose the five pictures among the total number to print and display. They will then write captions for those pictures that explain the link between the picture and that emotion.

Learning to Use the Camera and Take High-Quality Photos

Activity 8: Go over the parts and processes of the cameras and ask students to go and take several pictures of each other to experiment. Have them return and ask questions.

Activity 9: With written, detailed instructions, students will transfer their images from the memory card to the computer, add their name into the photographs, perform any necessary adjustments and print them.

Activity 10: With a partner take 5 photographs of people/things in the workshop area that reflect a variety of emotions (sad, brave, hungry, confused…) Students then share their rationale and pictures.
Activity: Ask students to focus on any given section of the room and write down as many as 50 "things" they see in that small area. Discuss what they learned.

Activity 11: Ask students to walk around the area and find a location on which to focus their attention. They are then to decide which one item they want to focus on in that location and explain their choices as they show their pictures.

Activity 12: Students will see examples of gallery quality pictures and be introduced to the qualities of good pictures.

The Logistics and Ethics of the Project

Students will make sure to get written permission from all human subjects before taking their photographs and verbal permission if taking pictures of someone's property.

Activity 13: Show pictures of the photographers themselves taken in an earlier activity. Ask the participants what are some of the emotions involved in being the "subject" of a photograph? What are the things they hate when people take pictures of them?

Activity 14: Read over the "Photographer Roles and responsibilities" handout, answer questions, and have photographers sign.


We want to thank the adult sponsors and the photographers in the Windham Youth PhotoVoice project: West River Valley: Lori Greenberg from Leyland and Gray Union High School and Cooper Feiner-Homer; Brattleboro: Ricky Davidson from the Boys and Girls Club of Brattleboro and Autumn Kendell, Zach Gilbeau, and Ann-Marie Bliss; Bellows Falls: Ellenka Wasung-Lott from the Boys and Girls Club and Danielle Southwell from Youth Services Inc., and Crystal Thomson, Jacqueline Cantor and Abi Baker; and Wilmington: Shelly Park, Sarah Dumaine, Michael Squiers, and Tony Roy. Not all members are pictured here.