Here’s a little peek of Photohoku‘s recent team-up with Living Dreams.jp, Touchy, and Satoshi Aoki. We’re working together on an initiative called Digital Natives thats focussed on children’s homes, and hopes to close an opportunity gap between students who can’t live with their parents, and their peers who can. Most of these kids are not technically orphans per se, but for whatever unique circumstances each child has, they all live together, away from their homes, and as a likely result of that stress, they’re coming out of school several steps behind their peers.
So the goal of Living Dreams and this particular Digital Natives project is to empower kids through technology, by basically putting a computer in each child’s hands and give them the skills they need to compete in the 21st century. There are numerous sponsors providing computers and tablets but the problem is that the kids don’t know what to do with them.
So Photohoku + Touchy + Satoshi (who is teaching them digital photography basics), is a 3-prong collaboration to use photography to spark their imagination and creativity, put digital cameras in their hands, get them comfortable on the computers, and position them with a good trajectory for the other digital education initiatives that are in the pipeline.
Because Photohoku is old school in terms of tech, it feels a bit odd that we’re helping push the kids digitally, so to speak, but thats exactly whats happening. And its working. More to come. Wish us luck!