Camera Grant Application

Omprakash Camera Grant

We offer Camera Grants to provide digital photography equipment for volunteers proposing to teach documentary photography to students at an Omprakash Partner abroad. Camera Grants are also available to individuals applying to teach students in their own home communities.

If Camera Grant applicants would like to seek funding as well, we encourage them to also apply for our Volunteer Grant.

We review our Camera Grants on the same four-cycle timeline as our Volunteer Grants. Deadlines are February 15th, May 15th, August 15th, and November 15th. Applicants can expect to be notified of a decision within two to three weeks of the deadline. 

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Included in the Grant

Each Camera Grant includes a set of eight compact digital cameras with all of the necessary materials to charge, protect, and maintain the cameras and to safely store their images. Grants also include a PhotoPals Book of student images from a past PhotoPals program that recipients may use as a teaching tool with their students.

We also have one Flip HD video camera available for videography projects. This camera is available alone or along with a set of 8 compact digital cameras.

Camera Grant Applicants

We are looking for applicants who will empower students both with documentary photography skills and with the opportunity to share their perspectives with each other, with members of their community, and with students around the world.

Applicants may utilize the Resources section of the Omprakash website and view past PhotoPals Project Pages to help generate ideas for their proposals from past Camera Grant recipients.  Before applying, applicants should also review Our Expectations of grant recipients and the PhotoPals Ethical Code for teaching documentary photography.

We strongly encourage our grant recipients to be creative and innovative in their strategies for using students’ images to connect, inform, and inspire others. Ideal applicants are committed to making a long-term contribution to the Omprakash network and the PhotoPals program. These contributions might involve:

• Outreach to prospective volunteers: Raise awareness about PhotoPals and the Omprakash network by delivering presentations, using social media, building relationships on local high school and university campuses, organizing events or gallery shows in your home community, etc.
   
• Sharing well-designed materials in our archive of Resources: Upload student photographs onto the Omprakash media page, post curriculum maps, share successful lesson plans, and brainstorm ways teachers could use your students’ images as teaching tools in their own classrooms.
   
• Classroom Collaboration: Help other students around the world learn from your PhotoPals program. For example, organize an image exchange between your students and another photography workshop, create a book of your students’ images to send to other classrooms, or design a lesson plan about your students’ culture using their photographs.
   
• Fundraising for our Partner Organizations or directly for PhotoPals: Organize a camera drive to donate used digital cameras to the Partner or school where you are teaching, hang a gallery show of your students’ images in a local cafe and collect donations, feature your students’ images on greeting cards, the possibilities are endless!
   
• Mentoring future PhotoPals Volunteers: We hope that all grant recipients will be available to mentor future volunteers. 

Currently, our Camera Grant is limited to applicants who can easily and safely receive a package containing $1000 worth of camera equipment by regular mail. Be prepared to detail the logistics for how we should send the cameras to you, particularly if your mailing address is outside of the United States. Please be aware that it is unusual for us to give grants to volunteers who propose to use the cameras for less than four weeks.

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If you have any other questions regarding Omprakash Camera Grants, please contact sam@omprakash.org or jonathan@omprakash.org.

Note: Every applicant must complete this form. There are no “group applications.”

Note: It is not possible to save your work while filling out our online application form. To prevent frustration, we advise formulating your answers in a separate document and then pasting them into the form below.

You must create a volunteer profile before applying for a grant.
After registering, return to this page to fill out the application.

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