Contact: Patti Klein Lerner,
(818) 677-2130

CSUN Program Helps Foster Children,
Pacoima Residents "Picture" Their Communities

The Center for Community-Service Learning at California State University, Northridge, has been awarded 20 cameras and free photo developing and book-binding services as part of the Community Treasures Program sponsored by the Thomas Bros. Maps Educational Foundation.

The Community Treasures program was created to provide cameras to elementary schools in California so children can explore and learn about their communities' rich history and resources by photographing the world around them.

But Maureen Rubin, director of the Center for Community-Service Learning, asked the Thomas Bros. Foundation to expand the program to CSUN students doing community-based service projects.

"We hope CSUN students and professors can make the classroom come alive by having our students work in the community on photography-related projects," said Rubin, who founded the program that allows CSUN students to earn academic credit by providing direct service to schools, nonprofit and public organizations. "The best thing about service-learning is that everybody wins. Our students learn more and people in the community benefit in many ways."

In one service-learning project, students from three of instructor Lesley Krane's "Photography As Art" beginning photography classes will work with 11-17 year-olds from Children Are Our Future, a network of therapeutic group homes in the Valley.

Most of the children who live in these homes have failed in the foster care system and have been shuttled from place to place their whole lives. Many have no sense of their own history or community. Often, they lack even family snapshots and have never seen their own baby pictures.

Krane said she hopes her CSUN students will gain competence in photography while teaching it to the foster children. "My students also want to give the kids a sense of their own history; one that is not fragmented," Krane added. The children who are especially enthusiastic about photography may be taken on a field trip to CSUN's Photo Laboratory, Rubin said.

Graduate students in Dr. Kathryn Sorrells' seminar in Intercultural Communication will use the rest of the cameras, collaborating with Pacoima Beautiful, a nonprofit group dedicated to environmental education and advocacy in one of our area's most under-served communities.

The CSUN Communications Studies majors will work with Pacoima residents in a joint project they hope will contribute to a more positive image of Pacoima in the media and with the general public.

CSUN student researchers will gather stories and pictures from a range of sources, including elementary school children, youth and the elderly. Pacoima residents will be asked to photograph what they like and see as "beautiful" in their community. The CSUN students then hope to work with the Pacoima community to create a visual collage or community mural using the images.

Qualex Labs of Burbank will develop the film at no cost. The CSUN students will work with the foster children and Pacoima residents to assemble separate Community Treasures albums, which will be bound at no cost by the Spiral Binding Company, Inc. and presented to CSUN's community partners as permanent records of the project.