Digital Imaging Workshops - Arte Moris

Arte Moris Art School, Dili, East Timor, 2010

I visited the inspiring non-profit, non-institutional fine art school, Arte Moris in Dili in Jan 2010. Set in the crumbling ruins of an old Indonesian museum, around 15 artists live and create there in all manner of eclectically decorated studios and labyrinthine rooms. They run series of art classes for local youth and children - providing a rare chance for young people to learn creative techniques.

The school accepts photographers and artists to work with the local artists, so I ran several workshops in photography and digital imagining for the artists, and donated some cameras so they could introduce more photography into their work.

Arte Moris website














The live-in artists

Self-perceptions of agency and social change

This research project formed part of the transformational learning subject in my Social Ecology masters. It explores my interest in people's own view of their ability to make positive social change. To do this I wrote and disseminated a brief online survey to approximately 30 (largely) self-identified social change agents.

• Their collated anonymous full responses can be found here.
  
• I analysed these responses and wrote a research paper that can be found here.
• If you would like to take the survey itself, or know a friend who might, the survey is still current and the link is here.
  

Survey Questions

1. Brief question: How do you currently 'create positive change' in the world?
   
2. Brief question: What 'world(s)' do you create this change in?
3. Brief question: What does 'positive change' mean for you personally in these context(s)?
4. In the context of your replies above, how would you currently describe your own agency - your capacity to change the world for the better?
5. Describe one or two specific key transformational experience(s) in your life that changed your perception of your own ability to make positive change? How did these changes occur?
   
6. How much of an factor were group or social interactions compared with your own individual growth in these experiences? Please explain.
7. Please reflect on your experience of completing this survey. How did the process of articulating your experiences and self-perceptions makes you feel? Does it reinforce or weaken particular self-beliefs?

Friends of Kolkata

Kolkata, India - Melbourne, Australia 2004-present

Friends of Kolkata is a volunteer run Melbourne based organisation that arranges fundraising, educational and volunteer exchange activities on behalf of the Institute of Social Work (ISW), a non-government organisation in Kolkata, India.

Five friends - Chris Turton, Yoriko Otomo, Christian Clark, Lara Thurlow, and myself, volunteered for approximately a month at two Kolkata-based NGOs - the Centre for Communication and Development and The Institute of Social Work in 2004. We managed to have a positive impact on the children in our time there despite our inexperience, and were encouraged by the Indian organisations to take our enthusiasm further on our return to Australia.

So after returning to Melbourne we set up Friends of Kolkata, incorporating and organisating the first event - a fundraising exhibition in August 2005 at Irene Community Arts Warehouse Brunswick. It featured both my own photographs, and some of the images of the Indian children who I had been teaching photography.  In 2007 I led a volunteer trip back to Kolkata which resulted in another, larger photographic exhibition at Melbourne University that shared the stories and experiences of the children.

Friends of Kolkata continues to work with ISW today. The latter organisation seeks to protect children’s and women’s rights by providing communities with access to education, vocational training, microcredit and health services, and by assisting women and children affected by family violence.


Friends of Kolkata


The Institute of Social Work


The Centre for Communication and Development

International Humanity Foundation Projects

International Humanity Foundation, Medan, Indonesia, 2009

I worked with International Humanity Foundation (IHF) at its Medan centre for a month in early 2009.

IHF was founded in 1983 by Carol Sasaki. Today, it is comprised of seven locations in Thailand , Kenya, Indonesia & the United States caring for more than 3,000 children worldwide. IHF is a unique organization in that all those involved at any level consider themselves to be members of the IHF family. It is also unique in that overseas volunteers participate in much of the daily running of the organisation through their coordinated online work. In this way the volunteering costs are far reduced as there is less need for paid staff.

Whilst I was there, I initiated a variety of different small projects, shown in the images below.  Amongst these were photography workshops to encourage the young people visiting the centre to express themselves through images.

The project recommendation report goes into more detail.

IHF website

Cultural Footprint Pledge Project

Sustainable Living Festival, Melbourne, 2010

This project provided a mechanism for participants to make pledges around specific, do-able actions to have impact on climate change. It was initiated as a response to a) the Copenhagen climate discussions failing to produce a meaningful actions and by extension the collective lack of political leadership around climate change b) the over-aching emphasis on personal (as opposed to community level or political) responses to the climate situation.

Because of these factors, I choose to focus the actions on social and political influence, as reflected in the concept of expanding one's 'cultural footprint', in contrast with personal actions, which are designed to reduce one's 'ecological footprint'. Both are necessary and support each other.

The project was very successful with hundreds of participants contributing pledges, of which they kept a carbon copy as a reminder to actually do the pledge.

For more details see The Pledge Project




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