Tell our Own Story: Photography at East Lake Elementary

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

Mrs. Jessica’s Summer Camp May 2013

Recipient: Mrs. Jessica Lawrence

Mrs. Jessica Lawrence, a longtime resident of East Lake Courts, started a summer camp over ten years ago for the children in her community. She wanted to create a safe and fun place for children to be able to go for the summer months. While social services and education funding is being cut from municipal and state budgets across the United States, the UNFoundation was eager to fund such an awesome example of do-it-yourself community building.

The summer camp ran from May 28 through August 7, with the hopes of transitioning to an after school program. The camp was organized as a collaboration between the East Lake Courts Recreation and Community Center, Grove Street Settlement House, and the Chattanooga Housing Authority—all with the help of some critical volunteers including university students from area Universities and Colleges. A majority of the attendants were students from Clifton Hills Elementary or East Lake Elementary, where over 95% of students are receiving free or reduce lunches. The program provided a critical source of meals for breakfast and lunch each day, but also a place for them to continue critical learning through LEXIA, a computer-based reading program.