Picturing Change: Harnessing Client Visual Language To See & Create New Futures

Webinars

Description

This course will provide participants with the skills needed to develop a Photo Voice project plan and the ability to tailor the plan to different populations. We will look at the history of and effectiveness of Photo Voice with different groups and explore its relevance to both mental health providers and agency/community-based administrators and workers.

• For mental health workers, Photo Voice is an engaging way to work with clients to allow them to express themselves, identify their clinical goals, and describe and depict these in their own words and images. This method can provide clients with an opportunity to see aspects of their past, present, and future selves, and navigate a way forward toward specific goals.
• In agency and/or community-based settings, Photo Voice can be used as a type of needs assessment, allowing clients to depict issues that they deem as important to address.
• The projects can also be used for community and/or coalition building around different issues and for advocacy on different scales for policy change.

As many clients have high-quality cameras that they carry with them in their smartphones, they can easily participate in facilitated Photo Voice projects. We will learn how to design a project in which clients can both create their own images and accompanying words to express themselves and have a structure in which to view and speak about these. It is an opportunity to depict experiences, reframe these and create images of the type of world clients wish to build and inhabit.

A Hands-On Opportunity To Learn

In this two-part workshop, participants will have an opportunity to experience the power of Photovoice.

• Part one will provide participants with the background/history of Photo Voice, they will be shown examples of Photo Voice projects with different populations and have an opportunity to engage and ask questions about projects they may wish to design and implement. The group will then be given different themes and will agree on one that they will engage with and will each individually create images/words to allow them to have the Photo Voice experience.
• Part Two will be a sharing of the work and an opportunity to experience how a Photovoice project works and its power in the context of both individuals and a group.

About the Instructor:

Annie Levy is trained as a writer and photographer with her BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and her LMSW from the Silberman School of Social Work. She has been combining her expertise in these fields to work as a program, communications, and messaging strategist for leading foundations, companies, and organizations. All to bring the mission of a company, organization, idea, or community to life in a way that engages existing audiences, creates new ones and moves people to action.

She has over 15 years of experience creating Photovoice projects working with the National Academy of Medicine on integrating voices of the community in their work to bringing to life the stories of teens of Blue Star Families to working with young people with critical illnesses. From this work she creates large-scale communications projects, designing presentations and exhibits, working both “in-house” as well as on consulting assignments. Her work has been commissioned, among other places by The Frick Collection, seen at the United Nations, and has been part of the National Academy of Medicine’s public-facing projects about Health Equity and Clinician Well-Being and the John A. Hartford and Arnold P. Gold Foundation’s communications efforts.

Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Create a plan for a Photovoice project
• Use tools to adapt the plan/structure to a particular group of clients or in a specific setting
• Identify a sample project they want to design with a specific theme or issues to be addressed
• Create Photovoice prompts for the project
• Identify potential uses/audiences for the end product images and words
• Create a structure to integrate the work into the ongoing life of the individual, group or Organization
• Describe the experience of a Photovoice project with firsthand knowledge and experience