Supporting Education at The VII Foundation

Education at The VII Foundation

| A group of Ukrainian IDPs fled Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, on March 12, 2022.

This northern area of the city has seen heavy fighting and shelling.

The group arrives at an area before the destroyed bridge into the city during the third week of the Russian invasion. ©Byron Smith for the VII Mentor Program

The VII Foundation trains and equips emerging visual journalists from communities underrepresented in the media. These practitioners have a front-seat perspective on urgent challenges that concern us all.

In the last four years, VII Academy has trained over 1,200 people from 100 countries in nine languages, with more than half identifying as female.

1.000

100

9

4

PEOPLE

COUNTRIES

LANGUAGES

Y E A R S

$1.500

$2.000

$12.000

$16.000

SUPPORTS ONE LEVEL 1 STUDENT

SUPPORTS ONE LEVEL 2 STUDENT

SUPPORTS ONE VII MENTEE

SUPPORTS ONE LEVEL 3 FELLOW

$1.500 USD would support an individual Level 1 student in 2024.

$2.000 USD would support an individual Level 2 student in 2024.

$12.000 USD would support an individual VII Mentee in 2024.

$16.000 USD would support an individual Level 3 Fellow in 2024.

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The VII Foundation The VII Foundation‘s mission is to transform visual journalism by empowering new voices and creating stories that advocate change.

In a world where beliefs and actions are increasingly out-of-sync with facts and realities, transforming visual journalism is an urgent task.

The VII Foundation trains and equips emerging visual journalists from communities underrepresented in the media. These practitioners have a front-seat perspective on urgent challenges that concern us all. The VII Foundation teaches essential skills and strategies to ensure the truth is documented and made availableto a global audience seeking to make decisions and choices based on facts, not hearsay.

Our training is tuition-free and conducted by leading professional journalists who have worked for decades on the frontlines of some of our societies’ most complex and difficult challenges. In this era of an underfunded, dying global media enterprise, our trainees help ensure the global conversation continues and is fuelled by first-person reporting vs. unsourced, uncredited rumors and factual manipulation. In addition to empowering over 1,200 new voices in journalism from more than 100 countries, we host public conversations and critical debates that ask tough questions about the context, purpose, and impact of images. We create largescale and long-term documentary projects, exhibitions, and films that reveal complex realities; advocate for change; and serve as resources for policymakers, the public, and journalists worldwide.

To deliver our mission, we have an educational stream of three programs - VII Academy, VII Community, and VII Insider. | Members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), one of the residence groups based in Tanintharyi Region, are in Tanintharyi township of Tanintharyi Region on October 16, 2023, in the Southern Part of Myanmar. ©Mar Naw for VII Academy

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VII Academy VII Academy provides tuition-free courses in visual journalism to practitioners in the Majority World and underrepresented communities in G20 countries. VII Academy is democratizing the information narrative and giving communities the tools to narrate their own stories in regions where media education is poorly resourced.

In the last four years, VII Academy has trained over 1,200 people from 100 countries in nine languages, with more than half of them identifying as female.

VII Academy training is structured as a pathway from the first point of contact to high-level practice. It is done online or in person at campuses in Arles, France, and Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina. VII Academy has three programs: • The Program for Narrative and Documentary Photography, with courses at Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 • VII Mentor Program, which provides a 12-month structured professional environment for emerging new talents in the industry • The MA in Visual Journalism, in partnership with the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo, is a two-year course beginning in 2024-25. The MA program will also have a one-year Certificate in Visual Journalism option

| Khadijeh, 78, lives alone in a small room in Takhtak village. Many elderly people live alone here because their children have left the lake. Hamun lake, Iran, 2015. ©Mahdi Barchian

In addition, VII Academy partners with like-minded organizations to provide additional, focused training initiatives. VII Academy’s programs are enabled by the generous support of our partners, especially The William, Jeff & Jennifer Gross Family Foundation, PhotoWings, Canon, Creative New Zealand, the Foundation for Systemic Change, Leica, and the Poklon Foundation.

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(a) Level 1 caters to students with basic photography experience who want to become visual journalists. It provides a solid foundation of practical skills, including camera control, fulfilling a brief for commissions, and writing captions. It also introduces good practices in ethics, video, social media, and running a solo business. Level 1 is taught via a 12-week online seminar for ten students at a time, with at least nine Level 1 courses each year. (b) Level 2 takes the best students and equips them with additional skills, extending the concepts from Level 1 and adding a writing component taught by a writing tutor. Level 2 is taught via a 12-week online seminar for ten students at a time, with two Level 2 courses each year. (c) Level 3 takes the most accomplished students from Level 2 and brings them free of charge to the foundation’s Alexandra Boulat Campus in Arles for an intensive, interdisciplinary, in-person, month-long program. After their time with us, they go home as accomplished practitioners who are well-versed in contemporary media ethics and journalistic values and can take on complex assignments for leading media, NGOs, and corporations worldwide.

Second, the VII Mentor Program provides a structured professional environment for emerging new talents in the industry, whether trained by VII Academy or not. The program – the first of its kind – was launched by VII Photo Agency in 2008 and is now managed

by VII Academy. This hybrid program pairs ten selected visual journalists with experienced VII photographers. It runs online for 11 months, followed by two weeks in-person in Arles during the professional week of the Rencontres d’Arles festival. The VII Mentor Program has nurtured the careers of many visual journalists who have become leading practitioners. | The young members of the ‘Sama’ ensemble during a rehearsal at the Muzhava village dance studio beside the occupied Abkhazia region. Almost 80% of these ensemble members come from families displaced due to the war in Abkhazia. Giorgi Matua, the ensemble’s founder, teaches Georgian traditional dances to most of them for free. Performing Georgian dances in public is prohibited in Abkhazia’s breakaway region. April 30, 2023. Village Muzhava, Samegrelo region, Georgia. ©Tako Robakidze for the VII Mentor Program

Third, the MA in Visual Journalism, developed in partnership with — and accredited by — the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo, is a two-year course that will begin in 2024-

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2025 and cap VII Academy’s pathway, providing a higher education qualification for those who want to work as documentarians, curators, editors, and university lecturers. The MA program will also have a one-year option, offering a Certificate in Visual Journalism to those practitioners who don’t have a BA degree and/or do not wish to complete a thesis project. The course will be fee-paying and open to all, with scholarships for students from the Majority World.

VII Community In the foundation’s education pathway, ongoing support for our alumni is a vital task. To this end, we created VII Community in partnership with PhotoWings.

VII Community is a network of VII Academy alumni and Foundry Photojournalism Workshop participants that number more than 1,400 professionals. It supports those who have completed our courses with connections to the profession through online discussions, presentations, reviews, in-person global meet-ups, and a Discord platform for regular exchanges.

VII Insider The foundation seeks to elevate the public conversation about visual journalism. For this, we have VII Insider, our free online platform for debate that takes the general audience inside the profession of visual journalism to advance the production and analysis of photography, documentary stories, and visual journalism. Our partnership with PhotoWings makes VII Insider possible.

| Omar helps to collect and transport garbage from the public beach of Tintipan. ©Charlie Cordero for VII Academy Fellows

VII Insider brings people together to see creative presentations, learn from experts in the field, and read analyses of visual journalism. VII Insider offers regular live presentations, an extensive and searchable video collection of more than 120 previous events, and publishes the

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best writing on the role of images in Dispatches: The VII Insider Blog (with 45 articles now on Substack and new posts every month).

How you can support our education mission All our training for the Majority World is free, with every student’s costs paid for by the foundation, because we believe building the capacity of local storytellers is essential to producing a better and more comprehensive understanding of our complex world.

We want to expand our work, and there are many ways to join our existing partners and support the growth of the educational initiatives we have described above: • In 2024, VII Academy is planning to run online Level 1 courses for visual journalists in Asia, the Balkans (x2), Central and South America (x2), Anglophone Africa, and Francophone Africa, as well as Native Farsi speakers and Native Arabic speakers (x2).

US$1,500 would support an individual student.

• VII Academy intends to run two online Level 2 courses in 2024, with 10 of the best students from all regions in each course.

US$2,000 would support an individual student.

• The Level 3 in-person, month-long course for the most accomplished students from Level 2 should run once in 2024.

We want to bring ten visual journalists to Arles with all their expenses covered. US$16,000 would support one student (allinclusive support in both cases, covering tuition, travel, visa, accommodation, meals, and all activities). | A group of displaced people of Kanyarutshinya Camp are logging in Virunga National Park in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. ©Daniel Kachunga Buuma for VII Academy

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• Enabling an emerging new talent in the industry to be part of the VII Mentor Program so they can build a sustainable and impactful career can be funded with US$12,000 for one mentee.

• We want to build a scholarship fund to cover the fees for Majority World students to take the new MA in Visual Journalism at the University of Sarajevo (two-year program) or the Certificate in Visual Journalism (one-year program). The fees for this new program have yet to be confirmed with the University of Sarajevo.

To sponsor multiple students or inquire about providing support for a full course, please contact our Education Director, Dr. David Campbell using the contact information below.

For more information Please contact Dr. David Campbell, Education Director of The VII Foundation, if you would like to discuss our programs and know more about how you can support us to empower new voices in visual journalism.

| Marilyn Malimban and Jenny Tiaga watch a video on Marilyn’s phone during a hike and camping trip in Mt. Banahaw in Quezon Province on October 26, 2019. Both lost their husbands to the war on drugs and had to work away from home to support their children. Death of a Nation documents the Philippines’ drug offensive and won a World Press Photo award in 2023. ©Kimberly dela Cruz for the VII Mentor Program

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