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| about the vision collective |
history: The group began growing. In 2003, nine more members joined us. We held another exhibit in 2004 that traveled around to 21 kebele (neighborhood) halls in Addis Ababa with Yewoinshet Masresha, the director of our sister organization, Hope for Children. In 2004, our group had our first loss: Tenanesh Kifyalew, age 13, passed away. We still miss her deeply. An exhibit of her photographs were shown in her memory at the University of Queensland in Australia. In 2005, in an effort to support this project in Ethiopia and also to imagine other projects engaging marginalized communities in media-making processes, Eric, with the help of his friend Sahir Surmeli and his brother Michael Gottesman, registered the Vision Collective as a not-for-profit organization in the United States. In 2006, three developments occured. First, we expanded our group in Ethiopia to its current size: 23 children in our neighborhood. Secondly, we created a traveling exhibition of our work that visited towns and villages across Ethiopia, meeting our goal of reaching tens of thousands of Ethiopians with our photographs and information, produced by children affected by HIV/AIDS. Thirdly, in the first grant to the Vision Collective (from the Opportunity Fund), we began our video project. Daniel Negatu, an Ethiopian filmmaker, was brought on to lead the project. Daniel registered Eric's group of children as an organization (Sudden Flowers), that has become a successful registered NGO in Ethiopia, and a partner of the Vision Collective. Since 2006, we have produced over ten short films by children affected by HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia and won acclaim from local, national and international institutions such as UNICEF, the Open Society Institute, Harvard University, MTV, and Echoing Green. Also, in 2006, two of our members won a continent-wide documentary film competition called the Speak Africa Challenge and traveled to South Africa to receive training. In 2007, one of our members won the MTV Europe VLOGiT competition. In 2008, the Vision Collective began marketing films made by children affected by HIV/AIDS to universities and other audiences in the United States. So far, films we have represented are included in the Harvard, Amherst, Wesleyan, and Boston College Library Collections. In 2009, the Vision Collective began partnering with Elena Rue (Duke University) on a project using photography and film to explore the impact of trans-continental adoption. partners: www.suddenflowers.org board/staff: Mary Louise Cohen contact: email: info@thevisioncollective.org |