Fotokids

Fotokids programs focus on job skills that set our students apart from the 200,000 young people entering the work force every year and will put them in the 20% that actually find employment. Portfolios created by the students include the work they have done for actual clients, editorial and event photography, the designing and photographing of a commercial catalogue, and the creation of a web page. Guatemala City is the hub for all of our programs throughout Guatemala and all of our staff are graduates, we run an intern program for the teenage students that provides them with on the job training and experience working with real clients. Fotokids also provides through Fundación de Niños Artistas de Guatemala, counseling, tutoring, food baskets, nutritious lunches, transportation and experience working with international professionals in photography and design. As our covid challenges from 2021 continued into 2022, we were met with an increase in Covid 19 cases acerbated by the appearance of the Delta variant and by country-wide lack of vaccinations. The uptick in cases deeply affected the population Fotokids works with in Guatemala. In Guatemala City many families came down with covid, others lost their jobs, couldn't pay rent on their humble houses, and finding no employment opportunities in the City, they were forced to move to the interior or the coast to find work. There was no in person learning in schools for the children and most had no access to a smart phone where they participate in virtual online classes. The schools put heavy pressure on the parents to buy a smartphone or tablet. Fotokids reached out to our families to find and buy some second-hand phones and tablets. We also bought them internet cards (extremely costly for a struggling family at $15 a card) giving students internet access for 2 weeks at a time. Fotokids photography teaching continued throughout the year with small classes of five students each in a socially distanced space. This meant our teachers had many more classes to do to serve the 70 Fotokids students. For a teacher that instructed 20 students this became 4 different classes. In the City we were able to use 3 different outdoor locales within our Fotokids headquarters and our classes resumed in July 2022. We approached the schools and teachers that we had in our contacts in the areas of Zone 1, Boca del Monte, Villa Canales, Santa Fe.and this resulted in 29 new students who began classes in July 2022. Amidst this crisis Fotokids has continued with the food baskets as over 80% of our families have lost their jobs so putting food on the table was difficult if not impossible in some cases. In the Santiago Atitlán area, contact with the Schools began in June to find a new group of students, receiving a response from 55 students who began the testing process in September.

Our scholarship program for both Santiago Atitlan and Guatemala City provides children with the chance ot receive formal and vocational education

In Santiago Atitlán where we had 70 students attending during the pandemic we used the garden, the pergola and the new schoolhouse to give the Fotokids classes. Santiago was hit hard by the Delta virus, the lack of masking and resistance to vaccination. At Fotokids we required the staff to all be vaccinated and enforced our mask mandate, temperature taking, antibacterial cleaning, and social distancing.As the entire nation slipped into the red zone graph of contagion, we had to go back to using the SD cards with video lessons. The students attended Fotokids classes in person two times a month, where they received a list of photography themes, and compete in monthly photography competitions. we additionally had online photography and graphic design classes Amidst this crisis Fotokids continued with the food baskets as over 80% of our families had lost their jobs so putting food on the table was difficult if not impossible in some cases. Our budget only gave allowed us to give 3 food baskets a month to the neediest of families in Santiago Atitlán.