Critical Exposure provides students and organizations with hands-on training and innovative, effective tools to strengthen their efforts to secure a quality education for all children.
Our approach is three-pronged:
- Youth Empowerment - Provide students with training in documentary photography, leadership, and advocacy; teach them how to document issues that impact their lives; and help them to use their images and voices to advocate for positive solutions to those issues.
- Public Engagement - Inform and engage the public by using students' photographs and writing to create traveling exhibits that can be shown in galleries, libraries, coffee shops, and other public spaces to increase awareness of the issues facing young people.
- Policy Change - Partner with advocacy and community organizations to implement creative strategies that use youth photography and voice to strengthen campaigns to improve public schools and communities.
The benefits of this approach:
- Participating students learn not only to express themselves artistically but also to recognize the power of their art and their voices to produce measurable, meaningful change.
- Advocacy organizations become more effective by incorporating into their campaigns both visual imagery and voices of the youth who are affected by the policies they seek to change.
- The public is better informed about conditions in public schools and becomes more supportive of, and engaged in, reform efforts.
- More effective advocacy and a more engaged public lead to policies that improve public schools.
- Improved public schools benefit us all by leading to a better educated workforce, a stronger economy, a reduction in crime, and a significant step toward providing an equal opportunity for all.
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