Project Childhood

Project Childhood is a new organization to help unify photographers and help celebrate childhood.

It has just recently been launched in conjunction with April being National Child Abuse Prevention Month and is starting off by holding a contest. The contest is to help motivate photographers across the country to go out and donate their talents to photograph a family or child that otherwise cannot afford a portrait session and to also donate prints to them. The images created will be posted on the site along with the charity of their choice.

Many photographers across the country are already doing this and I think this is a great opportunity to encourage more. I recently wrote Chris (the founder) an e-mail to let some of the other ways that photographers could contribute and he surprised my by making me the first featured photographer.

I haven't entered the contest myself, may be doing that soon, but in the meantime I have donated 6 sets of templates for the winners of the contest. I'm excited to see the featured photographer listing because it also highlights an organization I've been helping for about a year now, East Central CASA. CASA and I are close neighbors and it is a pleasure to work with the staff. This year I contributed with donations for their largest fundraiser the Fire and Ice Gala. It is a wonderful event that highlights the children and raises money through ticket sales and a live and silent auction to fund the organizations efforts to support and promote court-appointed volunteer advocacy for abused and neglected children so they can thrive.

This years gala was Saturday night and it was a success. In case any photogs out there are wondering how to help other than offering their photography talents you can do many things. Purchase tickets and bring people who will contribute, donate items for live and silent auctions, donate art prints for auctions, create experience or educational packages that can be donated. Things we also did this year included donating our new Party Shots (photo booth) as a form of entertainment, I laid out the program for the event, donated supplies to decorate the event, time to help decorate the event, images from past sessions were used in a slideshow during the event to highlight happy healthy children and families and last for each ticket that was sold for the event we donated a studio portrait session and a 7x5 print. This was over 200 gift certificates totally more than $14K worth of services and was a great opportunity to make the low ticket price of $55 dollars seem like a good investment as each certificate is worth $70. There will be another post coming up with images from the event...

So anyway check out project childhood, CASA and other local charities and see what you can do to help abused and neglected children. Sorry for the long read, hopefully it was worth it.
CA