Essential Photovoice Facilitator Cohort
SPRING 2024
For 4 weeks in October, a group of 5 folks met and participated in a series of facilitated conversations about community using the Essential Photovoice (EPV) dialogue format. EPV is a recent pilot project of TH’s longtime dialogue consultant and friend Essential Partners in collaboration with Interfaith Photovoice (see below). The concept is simple: take photos responding to prompts each week, then come together to share and ask each other questions about the photos.
We had different sharing prompts each week:
Session 1: A picture to help people understand something about you, and a picture that would help people understand something about your community.
Session 2: How and where is your community growing and flourishing?
Session 3: What are your community’s deepest challenges?
Session 4: What has been done to address your community’s challenge(s)? What could be done to address your community’s challenges?
During the last session, the participants had time to create a final culmination of their learning over the month they spent together. They were prompted to flesh out a narrative or theme from all the photos they had taken and present it in a way that made sense to them, or make an emblem that represents the ideal community they would like to strive to create.
Feedback
All 5 of the facilitators gave the training experience a 4/4 rating. When asked “What stands out as the most significant thing you learned in this workshop? what surprised you most about what you learned?,” they responded:
“I learned to notice my surroundings and intentionally reflect on my role within my community.”
“The willingness to share, as well as common concerns and experiences.
“It was surprising that we are all a part of the Charlottesville community and yet our experiences are so varied and none of our pictures are the same, even if we hoped to use pictures to speak to the same issues or topic.”
When asked “how did this experience impact the way you feel about yourself or your community?,” they responded:
“I think I’ve come to see how I am a piece of my communities and can impact others uniquely through my own experiences and the lens that I see things.”
“It was impactful for me to be able to share my emotions about different events in my life that I didn't even know I had beforehand.”
“I felt that this experience caused me to treasure the joyful moments within my communities more than I have been.”
More about Essential Photovoice
Essential Partners was founded in 1989, with the mission of helping equip people to live and work better together in community by building trust and understanding across differences. Their trademark approach -Reflective Structured Dialogue- empowers people to have healthier, more complex, more inclusive conversations about polarizing differences of values, beliefs, and identities.
Interfaith Photovoice has been around almost as long as EP. It is an arts-based approach to understanding that invites participants to respond to a series of prompts with their own photographs. These photos are used in a series of meetings as the basis for small and large group discussions. At the end of a project, the visuals and narratives are used to engage a broader audience.
Essential Photovoice combines the concepts and methodologies of both approaches to bring more richness to connecting around or across a social issues, and to illuminate and illustrate what is important to those impacted (or inspired!) by curating an exhibition, hosting an event, or collaborating on a tangible item through which other people can engage or better understand that topic.