Dear Lucas, got your email, thanks and YES the project sounds great

David and Benjamin,

Evening, gentlemen. I’m a photographer, and I’m writing because I’ve been asked by a group I volunteer with in Guatemala to help them organize and lead some workshops on video and visual storytelling. The group is called Voces de Cambio, an after-school program for teenage girls that uses writing and photography to help foster creative growth, leadership and civic engagement. It’s a great program and does some really amazing work. To date most of their creative output has been still photography, but with this project we’re looking to get them creating video, and putting their previous experience with photography to work in multimedia pieces.

We’ve decided to use Kickstarter. (Here we go again…) I’ve been wanting to use Kickstarter for a while now, but felt I’d like to try and twist the rules a bit, i.e. creative good, rather than just creative, so I’ve been holding off on launching a project. When VdC asked me to consider this project, and we started to consider ways of funding it Kickstarter felt like the way to go. I also knew I’d probably get just as much out of teaching these workshops as the girls would taking them. I’m just in the last year started making the transition to using video so this will be a good challenge, and it’s exciting that the appeal was approved by the Kickstarter team. We’ve been live for just over a week now and we’re at 20%. Great, but still a long way to go. Might I ask you to take a quick look at our appeal, and if you feel it’s something inline with your work (which I feel it is) could you make a posting on your blog about it, as well as give a tweet.

We’ve had some really successful projects in the past with these girls, including a Radio project, and various community photo projects. I know with the right push this can be just as successful (we’ll i know that the girls will shine, it’s just raising the money to let that happen). Plus the curriculum we create for the workshops will eventually become part of the core program. As an aside, if you have any resources for teaching visual storytelling to youth I’d much appreciate a list.

Anyway, here’s the link to our appeal:

http://kck.st/hew1Er

and here’s more info on Voces de Cambio if you need it…

http://www.vocesdecambio.org

Thanks for your time,

Lucas