Donate to the Rare Earth Project!
The Rare Earth Project makes documentary videos with underserved youth across the globe.
For the last 2 years, I have been working at a community center in North Portland, teaching gardening & media creation skills to underserved youth. The results have been phenomenal. Growing food is empowering. Putting yourself on YOUTUBE is empowering. Up the kids.
check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4emcqyhWcM,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ3A_FUB6uM
Now I am taking all that I have learned to the streets of Kathmandu, Nepal, where my brother Gabriel and I will be teaching documentary video making at the Katja Foundation, an orphanage of 65 children in the outskirts of the city. Massive urban migration in the past 10 years have presented these kids with enormous challenges such as extreme environmental degradation and overcrowding, pressure to work in child labor and prostitution, and an ongoing civil war.
Despite this, the Katja Foundation has managed to provide a home and support network for these kids, as well as providing private school level education. My brother and I were invited last year to teach video storytelling and computer skills to the kids, and I will be living at the orphanage with the kids for the next several months. We will be making short documentaries focusing on the kids daily lives, their challenges and celebrations, and creating a Youtube channel where the children’s project will be shared with the world.
In order to make this project possible, we need 2 video cameras and a computer for editing. We need to raise $1000 by September 21st!
All donations go directly to the Katja Foundation Trust, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and are not for personal expenses. If this goal is met we will be able to permanently donate these valuable storytelling tools to the orphanage, and teach the children how to use them.
We are looking for the following much needed material items:
- an older laptop that can run iMovie or edit video
- an old hard-drive or flash memory video camera such as the JVC Everio or Flipcam
- any older digital cameras, especially ones that are rechargeable and can take short videos.
If you have a hard disk video camera, an old laptop, or an old digital camera that isn’t getting much use, please consider providing it for donation to the orphanage. For more information, please write jonah.adels@gmail.com or call me directly, 215-694-2464
Further global media democracy!
Everyone has a story!
- From the Katja Foundation TrustThere are approximately 5,000 street children drifting through Nepal, a number swollen by 1,000 every year. 50% – 60% work regularly in child labor. Most have no shelter, no means of support, no hope. They are called, ironically, ’survivors.’ Most are runaways or orphans. Some are abandoned. All are desperate and come to the Kathmandu Valley with hope to get a better life, but they end up on the street, prey of the environment, products of poverty and the rural exodus to the cities.