CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA
100CAMERAS X DRW COLLEGE PREP
100cameras X DRW College Prep is a part of a 8 class course that is custom designed by 100cameras to empower youth in a community they care about with the opportunity to learn how to process their stories and create change. Pictured here are 100cameras students during the course.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
During the fall of 2018, we partnered with Joby and Apple to work alongside 25 students in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, empowering them to learn new ways to process and tell the stories of their past, present, and future. In partnership with DRW College Prep, a local school in the North Lawndale neighborhood that serves youth who live nearby and are facing the ongoing everyday challenges that arise from a lack of resources. Their mission is to support and challenge students to become highly educated people of integrity who positively impact their community, aiming to prepare their scholars for success in college and beyond. For the first time, our curriculum piloted with the use of a new tool, the iPhone 11 camera, just weeks after its worldwide launch.
This program is committed to uplifting a narrative of Chicago’s West Side that the students experience on a daily basis -- one of creativity, of strength, and of hope. There are generational effects still in play from housing, education, and institutionalized racism, resulting in a multitude of challenges the students and community must encounter and navigate each day, and oftentimes, causing them to live in the margins. This causes various systematic issues, with gun violence being a significant one that the community must overcome regularly. Strength and curiosity were the theme of this program, and the students’ goals were hard earned and overachieved.
“In telling my story - I haven’t really had a chance to yet, and I feel like the ability to be able to tell my story now would be important, because there are often people in my neighborhood who haven’t, and who have stories. And I feel like everyone’s stories deserve to be told. And depending on when you tell your story it may affect a future outcome- and you can change the world with one story depending on the audience and how you portray your story.”
MEET THE STUDENTS
“As a testament to the 100cameras curriculum for the course, it adequately sets these students up to have a stronger voice for whatever it is that they feel the world needs to know...I think they’re leaving with more concrete goals, hopes, and dreams but also now plans to actually put those into fruition.”
“I would describe this program as educating and very empowering. It really helped me to be able to share my emotions and what I really see when taking pictures. It showed me a way to share my perspective with people, and it gave me the tools to do it. And now, I can take pictures and express the way I feel. I learned that I can be even more creative than I thought. That when I really put my mind to something that I can learn new techniques and ways to do it. With my background with overcoming everything that I did, [this program] really motivates me to continue on and to growing my mind and really be able to have a good future.”
STUDENT IMAGE GALLERY
100CAMERAS X JOBY
This program is made possible thanks to the collaboration with Vitec Imaging Solutions (a division of Vitec Group) and JOBY, one of its main brands, dedicated to smart photography and aimed at making spontaneous content creation a meaningful experience for the youths involved in this project but also for any creative mind around the world.
Follow us on social media to see images from the field as captured by the 100cameras X DRW College Prep team and the student photographers.