East Lake Community PTA is a network of parents, teachers, educators, and community members who are fierce, and who will do anything it takes to help children thrive. They believe the arts can play a strategic role in building up children and bringing our community together. So the plan is to equip 10 children in a Spring Break workshop to tell their own stories through art, to begin to see themselves as storytellers, to know that their own unique perspective tells the world something it could not know without them. How? Cameras. Enter The UNFoundation.
Shelton Brown of Humans of Chattanooga and Audrey Menard of ELLAchattanooga (also the PTA president) will teach kids basic skills of photography, portraits, and photojournalism. During the week, students will get to take their cameras home with them to document the stories around them. Students will choose one photograph to have professionally printed and framed and then display their work at +Coffee in an art show. At the end of the workshop, the cameras will be donated to the art program the PTA is building at the Title 1 school, so that in the upcoming year, all 540 students can have access to the art of photography as they learn to tell their own visual stories. #winning
