Project Manager: Matt Daw
Action for Children Project Coordinator: Mark Benson
PhotoVoice Photography Facilitators: Liz Orton, Chris Smith, Rashmi Munikempanna, Zoe O’Reilly, Becky Duncan, Heidi Gazeley, Debbie Castro, Adam Lee, Brian Cregan, Mark Chilvers, Clare Struthers
PhotoVoice Film Facilitator: Sam Liebmann
Headliners Journalism Facilitator: Sam Hepworth
Book and Website Design: Erin Joy

Free online resource: www.rightscamerasaction.org.uk

Accompanying booklets are available featuring captioned photographs by young people illustrating the first 41 articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ideal as a classroom resource. For copies please email clare@photovoice.org.

16th December 2011 marked 20 years since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was formerly adopted by the UK. Throughout 2011 PhotoVoice, in partnership with Action for Children, worked with young people all around the UK in order to gather their thoughts and experiences on the relevance and importance of child rights to their lives. The young people involved have included Young Carers, Looked After Young People, Homeless Young People and Disabled Young People.

On December 16th PhotoVoice and Action for Children launched an online multimedia resource at www.rightscamerasaction.org.uk to inform and engage young people across the UK about UNCRC. A booklet has also been produced to be used as a classroom tool and to signpost the online resource.

PhotoVoice worked throughout the Summer with six young people from Action for Children’s Southwark Young Carers group, exploring how they feel the UNCRC affects their lives and the lives of other young people in the UK. Through 12 workshops these young people were introduced to digital photography, journalism and film-making skills and supported to use their new skills to create content for the Rights Cameras Action resource and to illustrate the Right Year for Children website. While this course was in progress PhotoVoice facilitators travelled up and down the country to run one-off photography workshops with other groups of young people representing diverse demographics of young people in the UK. The workshops were designed to explore how photography can be used to engage and inform young people about children’s rights, while at the same time giving these young people the opportunity to feed their creativity and personal messages into the resources that will help to engage other young people going forward.

PhotoVoice is thrilled that fantastic charity The Photographic Angle are generously supporting six PhotoVoice project participants to continue developing their photographic skills through a bursary scheme launched early 2012.



The six successful recipients are all from our Lookout London project:

Nathaniel Williams
Bianca Tennant
Angelika Stolarz
Sansha Edwin
Victoria Omobuwajo
Venesha Cunningham

The Photographic Angle holds free exhibitions that travel across the UK transforming vacant spaces into temporary galleries. The exhibitions showcase the contemporary work from students, graduates and enthusiasts of the art of photography giving the public the chance to see the current practices from this dynamic field.

For each exhibition, an expert of the art of photography is invited to select a new theme inspired by their own research for which artists can submit work to tour around TPA galleries throughout the UK.

TPA have already collaborated with PhotoVoice for the Voices exhibition (see the pictures below) that showcased work from a range of recent PhotoVoice projects and took the photographs into public spaces and unusual venues. This new partnership marks the next phase of a relationship we hope to build upon over the years to come.

Project Manager: Matt Daw
Geffrye Museum Project Manager: Rachael Crofts
Geffrye Museum Project Officer: Louisa Knight
PhotoVoice Photography Facilitators: Chris Smith, Clare Struthers
William WilberForce Trust Community Worker: Zak Stavrou

The Geffrye is a key partner in Stories of the World: London. Stories of the World is one of the major projects at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Stories of the World is a UK cultural celebration of diversity and creativity which will explore the stories behind museum collections and work with young people to create exhibitions and events around specific themes that will attract new audiences to our museums. www.london2012.com

PhotoVoice teamed up with the Geffrye Museum to deliver a course of five weekly digital workshops with the young people from the World’s End Estate, Chelsea in Re:generate trust facilities, to learn and develop their photography skills and techniques.

Throughout the project the participants used photography as a way to engage with and think about what ‘home’ means to them. This project has enabled young people to engage in an open dialogue about their homes and has encouraged them to think about them afresh, exploring ‘what makes a home’ and the way they live.

The work displayed in this web gallery are photographs which the participants feel signify the themes they discussed the most. They have also written corresponding captions which gives you an insight into their lives.

The Worlds End Estate, London
Young people: Apphia, Robin, Damilola, John, Yanique

Project Manager: Matt Daw
Facilitators: Becky Duncan
Partner organisation: Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament hosted a day for 155 16 to 25 year olds, from across Scotland, for their Get the Picture! participative and interactive event. The event aimed to offer young people the chance to showcase their views, issues and lives in Scotland, as well as give them the opportunity to present their aspirations for Scotland over the next 5 years.

The means for expressing their views and opinions offered to the participants on the day ranged from cartoon making and street art, through photography to an open debate in the Debate Chamber.

The series of portraits created by the PhotoVoice participants make a visual comment on their chosen political message of the day. The results of their work are now avaliable for viewing in the gallery below.

Project Manager: Matt Daw
Facilitators: Miguel Amortegui (Homerton) and Ania Dabrowska (Walthamstow)
Support Facilitators: Dinah Kenyon (Homerton) and Jaime Antonio Leme Jr (Walthamstow)
Partner organisation: Chapter 1 (www.ch1.org.uk)

Generously funded by the Marathon of Marathons Trust and an anonymous funder

Lookout London is becoming Lookout UK!

Young people needed this Summer to join the debate around gangs and knife crime.

The Lookout project provides young people (under 25) with the opportunity, the skills and the support to feed their perspectives into the debate on gangs and knife crime issues through photography. The aim is to amplify the voices of young people in the discussion about the causes and potential solutions to gang and knife crime issues, encourage other young people to speak out, and to encourage the media and public to consider their voices to be relevant and important in the debate.

PhotoVoice is looking for groups of young people from a variety of locations and demographics to take part in the Lookout project. They will receive photographic training from professional photographers and be supported to create work that will be part of local and national outputs, and showcased at a youth-orientated conference on gangs and knife crime in 2013.

If you are interested in a group of 10 young people from your organisation or Local Authority participating in the Lookout project, and you can cover the costs of a course of 10 workshops (Approx £6,000 including equipment retained by the project or participants and a local exhibition of their work), please contact matt@photovoice.org

In 2011 PhotoVoice completed a course of photography workshops with 19 young people living in supported housing in Homerton and Walhamstow.

The groups have been supported to explore the issues of gang culture and knife crime through photography, in order to produce captioned photos that convey their experiences and perspectives to peers and the general public. Too often the media representation of these issues is confused with a general representation of young people, without recognition that young people are more often the victims of these issues than adults, and the perpetrators are only a limited cross section of young people in Britain.

Funding Partner: Cheshire East Council
Project Manager: Matt Daw
Facilitators: Adam Lee, Tabitha Jussa, Glynis Shaw

In March 2011, PhotoVoice ran digital photography workshops with young disabled people attending activity clubs organised through the Aiming High for Disabled Children 2011 programme. The aim was to provide the young people with tools and skills that would allow them to share what they enjoyed and what they felt could be improved or added in future short break service programmes. Armed with cameras and supported by PhotoVoice facilitators, twelve young people from three different activity clubs in Macclesfield - Active8, SPACE and The Parachute Club - used their cameras to document and explore their experience of short break services.

The photographs and accompanying captions by the young people were showcased at an event in Middlewich, Cheshire East, on 29th March 2011. The event was attended by service providers, teachers, staff from Cheshire East Council, parents, local press and the Deputy Mayor of Cheshire East. This event was the first stage in a review of the Aiming high for Disabled Children programme, which will feed into decisions about what shape future services for young disabled people in Cheshire East could take. This photography project ensured that the young people who experience these services first hand could feed into this process, and that their first hand experiences will inform the decisions made now and in the future.

Photographs by the young people will be put on permanent display in local authority buildings throughout Cheshire East, so that these young people retain a visible presence in the very places where policies and programmes that directly affect them are created.

“We have really enjoyed working with Photovoice and their skilled team of workshop leaders.  The young people had a fantastic time and were able to express their own views in a very hands on, immediate way.  Not only did we get a chance to see what short breaks worked and what we should concentrate on in future short break design, but everyone had fun doing it too.” Ann Clark, Project Adviser – Aiming High for Disabled Children

Funding Partner: Awards for All Scotland- The National Lottery, The Gannochy Trust, The Robertson Trust
Project Manager: Jane Martin
Facilitators: Brian Sweeney, Christina Kernohan, Becky Duncan

In the year 2009-10 more than 10, 000 young people (aged 18 – 24) in Scotland were accepted as homeless.

Over the winter we’ve been working with Fairbridge Glasgow (for the second time) and eleven young people affected by homelessness. After a residential teambuilding trip of night photography, glowsticks and white water rafting, they met twice a week for six weeks with facilitators Brian Sweeney, Christina Kernohan, and Fairbridge Staff, travelling over Glasgow to shoot an impressive body of work.

In 2003 the Scottish Parliament passed groundbreaking legislation stating that everyone who is homeless would have the right to a home by 2012. This programme to tackle homelessness has received international acclaim and Scotland has been recognised as having the best homelessness legislation in western Europe.

Many young people are living in unsuitable temporary accommodation, waiting for a permanent place to live. When they are offered a place it is often in a location or in a condition that others won’t accept. Support available to furnish it can take a long time to come through, and young people can be forced into paying rent for places they can’t yet live in.  For some young people this means double rent and years paying off the arrears. 

In 2012 when the legislation comes into place all homeless young people will have the right to a home – but for this right to become reality there must be homes for them to live in.

Funding Partner: National Working Group
Project Manager: Jane Martin
Facilitators: Kyna Gourley

In August 2009 The National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People approached us to develop a project supported by their members, for young people to develop new skills, and in a safe space reflect on and articulate their views, experiences and identity. The project was also an opportunity to develop peer support and make links between different projects nationally. It has created a young person led body of work (photographs and writing) which represents some of the participants’ key issues to a wider audience.

From January to September 2010 28 young people (aged 12 to 25) from eight projects across England worked with PhotoVoice, the NWG project coordinator, and Kyna Gourley freelance photographer and facilitator in creating the photographs you can see in the gallery below, and in the linked publication. The work was shown to an invited audience for the first time in October 2010 and is being exhibited across England during 2011.

Project Managers: Jane Martin, Matt Daw
Local Coordination: Karen Gleave, Anne McManiman
PhotoVoice Facilitators: Adam Lee, Bec Garland, Colin McPherson, Glynis Shaw, John Lafferty, Tabitha Jussa

In 2010 the Northwest Regional SEN Hub Steering group decided that the focus of their work strand should be to give a platform to the young people of the region so that services could be improved based on their perceptions and experiences.

The NW Hub commissioned PhotoVoice to run photography workshops with more than 30 young people across eight local authorities, in Bury, Cumbria, Cheshire East, Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens and Warrington. In April 2010 some of the work produced by the young people was showcased at an event based at SEN practitioners from across the North West, held at the Reebok Stadium. The event provided a platform for a representative group of young people with SEN and Disabilities to showcase their work and share their messages with decision makers and managers from the region and from the National Field force. Young people attended to explain their work, share their thoughts with delegates directly, and to demonstrate their talents through dance, poetry and song.

Final report into the outcomes of the project (pdf)

Project Manager: Matt Daw
Funding Partner: Liverpool Council Art Funding
PhotoVoice Facilitators: Adam Lee Alison, Southward, Bec Garland, Glynis Shaw, Janet Brandon, John Lafferty, Russell Wright, Tabitha Jussa, Vik

From July 2009 PhotoVoice has been working in partnership with the Liverpool City Council (LCC) to deliver photographic workshops with young people across Liverpool to provide them with a new skill and a way to express their thoughts and aspirations to their families, peers and the public.

PhotoVoice has been working with young people living in three of the Children’s Homes in Liverpool, as well as young people with learning difficulties and physical disabilities across the city. More than thirty young people have taken part in the project, producing excellent
photographs that convey their unique perspectives on life
and on the city they live in.

The photographs produced by the young people will be showcased to the public and press in Liverpool through an exhibition at the prestigious BlueCoat Gallery in Liverpool town centre from December 14th – 21st, and through the dissemination of postcards that will carry these seldom heard voices to new audiences.

A travelling component of the exhibition will tour schools and public spaces in January. If you would be interested in hosting this exhibition at your premises or event please
contact Matt Daw: matt@photovoice.org

The work is also presented in a high quality photo book, available to purchase here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1107144