Posts Tagged ‘Boys and Girls Club’

In the begin­ning of Sep­tem­ber I posted a note about the youth photo ini­tia­tive that I’ll be run­ning in con­junc­tion with the Cal­gary board of edu­ca­tion and the Boys and Girls Club of Calgary..

The first few weeks have gone very well, and we’ve man­aged to select approx­i­mately ten stu­dents to com­plete the for-credit pro­gram. Dur­ing the last class we dis­cussed some of the cur­rent events that stu­dents felt strongly about, and in the end the group agreed to focus on the com­mu­nity of Bow­ness here in Cal­gary, which is an incred­i­bly diverse and (dare I say) unique com­mu­nity. Given said diver­sity, this will prove to be an inter­est­ing project as time goes on!

With the help of Jim at The Cam­era Store, we sent requests to sev­eral cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers to spon­sor the pro­gram with equip­ment.   Unfor­tu­nately the requests were not met favor­ably and as a result the school will have to pur­chase the cam­eras out­right.  I’d really like to give a plug to The Cam­era Store and par­tic­u­larly Jim for being so sup­port­ive of Boys and Girls Club pro­grams. They’ve helped on a few projects already and their com­mit­ment to help­ing the com­mu­nity should not go unnoticed!

I’ve sent the stu­dents out with the fol­low­ing home­work and next week (if all goes accord­ing to plan) we should begin to actu­ally work with cameras..

• (Cur­rent Events) Bring in 2 arti­cles (or pieces of writing)
  • Be pre­pared to talk about what they mean to you.
• (Observation)Find two out­side objects and visit them on at least four occa­sions in one day: Morn­ing, Mid-Day, Evening (sun­set), Night
• Record your observations
  • Shad­ows
  • Colours
  • Tex­ture
  • Con­trast

Now I’ll have to get myself out to do some home­work too; I must admit, it’s kinda fun to be back in school!

I’ve been asked to build and deliver a 12-week pho­tog­ra­phy train­ing course for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Cal­gary and the Cal­gary Board of Edu­ca­tion, Start Out­reach High School, and yes­ter­day we had a very pos­i­tive ini­tial meet­ing to dis­cuss the logis­tics of such a course.  Need­less to say, I’m extremely excited by the pos­si­bil­i­ties this project will present over the com­ing months as both orga­ni­za­tions are really open to new ideas and encour­ag­ing the stu­dents to explore.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Cal­gary pro­vide a dizzy­ing array of pro­grams for Cal­gary youth to pro­vide them with a car­ing and safe envi­ron­ment in which they can grow and learn.  I’ve worked with them on a few dif­fer­ent occa­sions and I’m chuffed to be work­ing with them again!

Start Out­reach pro­vides high school stu­dents with a self-paced learn­ing envi­ron­ment that allows them with the flex­i­bil­ity to com­plete their high school stud­ies with­out the typ­i­cal con­straints of a tra­di­tional school. As we dis­cussed their philoso­phies and learn­ing struc­ture I couldn’t help but think that I wish this sort of thing was around while I was still in school.   I’m really look­ing for­ward to work­ing with them on this project as well!

The project itself is just in the plan­ning stages at the moment so I’ll pro­vide more detail on how the pro­gram will run later. It will be open to stu­dents at the Start Out­reach High School in Bow­ness, with addi­tional spots avail­able to stu­dents at other CBE Out­reach schools if we have space available.