Week 1 of service

This Thursday we started service groups. I have chosen to join "The Pursuit of Happiness" which is a totally new service group- credits to my friend Hasith for the initial idea and being the group leader!!

What we are starting is a essentially a photojournalistic "club" per say that through our work hope to bring about some social justice. I think our mission statement best explain this:

We had our first meeting on Thursday which was really exciting and we're all feeling really inspired to get out and get it started. We also launched our Facebook page as well, which I will link at the bottom of this post (totally check it out and even better, chuck us a like!!)

Essentially, what we plan to do is go out and photograph people or places/environments in need, and in the caption of each photo write a something about the person or place's story. All of these photos will then be uploaded to our Facebook page and will be seen by people all around the world!! This will raise awareness about the issues we photograph and hopefully move people to the point where they are inspired to do something proactive about the issue. The next stage of the project is providing such people with opportunities to make that difference. We plan to get affiliated agencies/charities that do work related to the issues we photograph and upload links to online donation pages or information about how to get involved. As an example, we might upload a series of photos and stories of young children who suffer from cancer. What we will then also upload is a link to a charity that specifically works with children's cancer.

We haven't got much on the page yet as we are still setting up all of the infrastructure of the project, but within a month we should have the ball rolling. What I have found most exciting and inspiring so far is the responses we are already getting from the public. After just 24 hours of our Facebook's page launch, we already had over 200 likes on Facebook, and plenty of messages from friends and family members excited to get involved.

At our meeting next week we are going to start establishing a timeline and plan out the next few months of the project so that we can start getting photos up and these in-need causes recognised!

Here is the facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/tphserviceproject