Photovoice!

We all know that a photo is worth a thousand words.  Photovoice is an awesome tool that helps us harness the power of an image to create a message about our lives.  It is a great way to spread awareness about the health and well being of your community, and also to better cultivate your understanding of yourself and where you are going.  For our fifth meeting of this year's Healers of Tomorrow (halfway point, yay!) our Healers completed a Photovoice project.  This assignment asked three questions:

1. What three ways that you identify yourself?
2. What are three issues/ challenges/ problems that you are most interested in?
3. Describe the community you live in.

For each of these questions, our youth leaders took one photo that represented some aspect of their answer.  After presenting their images, they were challenged to consider how to bring these common threads together into a project for positive change.  All of our Healers did an excellent job, and we'll share with you here Hillal, Zeinab, and Amina's Photovoice.

1. List three ways that you describe yourself: "Muslimah, kind, and optimistic."

2. What is an issue/ challenge/ problem that you are most interested in? "I'm really passionate about helping others. I tutor a student in reading and help him."

3. Describe the community you live in. "This is my community. I am always around Muslims and I love my friends and peers because they are all my family."

Hillal decided that she could put her assets and interests together by becoming more involved in tutoring with the eventual goal to "help people in my community with not just school work but with everything and anything they want to talk about or work on."

1. Zeinab identifies as Ethiopian and is active in the Ethiopian Muslims Association. She is also clearly very friendly and kind!

2. She is passionate about knowledge, the power of words, and how we express ourselves.

3. She describes her community as being a strong community of family and friends that live with great hospitality!

Zeinab would like to combine the issues she cares about with her strengths by starting a book club at EMAS. 

1. Amina describes herself as scholarly, kind, and helpful. She is very studious!

2. Issues that Amina cares about are homelessness, starvation, and children. She particularly cares about the children in her neighborhood, some of whom are pictured here! She volunteers as a tutor at the Boys and Girls Club.

3. She describes her neighborhood as friendly, peaceful, and beautiful.

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Amina plans to expand her tutor role to mentoring as well.  She'd like to be known as a resource in her community, someone that younger students can look up to and receive guidance from.  She also wants to recruit her other friends in her neighborhood to do the same.

Has this activity inspired you to think about your strengths, passions, and what you can do in your community?  I hope so!  We are so proud of our youth leaders and know they are going to keep doing great things, and so can you.

In Peace and Health,
​Dr. Malik