[ Programs ] 

Since 2003, VisionWorkshops has worked in partnership with the National Geographic Society to create National Geographic Photo Camp (NGPC). NGPC is a series of workshops for youth from diverse communities worldwide, including displaced and refugee teens, guiding them as they learn to use photography to tell their own stories, explore the world around them, and develop deep connections with others.

VisionWorkshops has implemented over 115 Photo Camps in 35 countries.

VisionWorkshops has created a model partnership with the Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission (GSAM) in Banbasa, India. GSAM is an orphanage for abandoned children, a working farm, a school, and and a self-sustaining organization.

VisionWorkshops has worked to provide educational opportunities, ongoing mentorship, photography and writing programs and supplies for dozens of orphaned youth since 2016.

VisionWorkshops has partnered with the Refugee Youth Project (RYP), a program of Baltimore City Community College, since 2007. We've mentored young people who have made their home in Baltimore after escaping conflict and persecution in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Somolia, and other locations worldwide.
Our goal for our RYP partnership is to guide and support youth who are working to build new lives in Baltimore, and to listen to and share their stories through photography and writing. RYP student work has been shown at the Walters Art Museum, Stevenson University, and at the International Rescue Committee's Baltimore Resettlement Center.

VisionWorkshops partnered with UNHCR and the Annenberg Space for Photography in 2016 for a powerful program working with young people in the Soacha community of Bogotá, Colombia. These creative and resilient youth were from the IDP (internally displaced persons) community, and had been relocated due to violence in Colombia. VisionWorkshops mentors worked with students in Altos de la Florida as they documented their stories through photography.

VisionWorkshops created the Coming Up workshops in 2017, a program dedicated to empowering young people to use the creative process to examine and document their own stories, focusing on who they are and who they hope to become.  

Coming Up 2017 was produced in partnership with the community organization B.L.A.C.K. (Becoming Leaders Acquiring Critical Knowledge), Vision Workhops alum Deonte Ward, and local humanitarian photographer Allison Zaucha.

Crossing Borders is designed to provide opportunities for young immigrants and refugees who have come to the United States from many different countries and backgrounds. Since 2001 we’ve organized photography and writing workshops and exhibitions for over 1,000 middle and high school students through our Crossing Borders series. We encourage our students to document their lives here in the US and to explore the challenges they face as well as their hopes for the future. Our goal is to create connections across cultural boundaries for youth on their journey toward adulthood, using the tools of photojournalism.

Insights: The Identity Project was VisionWorkshops' first program and ran from 2003 through 2010.

Insights was a mentoring program designed for youth in the Juvenile Drug Court of Anne Arundel County, and focused on developing positive self-image and confidence among young people struggling with the cycles of addiction.

In 2018, VisionWorkshops partnered with Amachi Pittsburgh, an organization dedicated to empowering youth to overcome the challenges of parental incarceration.

Our staff of photographers and mentors worked to provide creative outlets and storytelling workshops for a group of Amachi Ambassadors.

VisionWorkshops partnered with the SuAnn Big Crow Boys and Girls Club in 2010 to work with Lakota students on the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation.

Along with photography workshops, our staff of mentors took students rock climbing and hiking in order for them to explore the natural world outside of the reservation, which many had never experienced.