photo by steed media service

What can you do to spread AIDS awareness? If you have never asked yourself that question, then perhaps you are not aware of how rampant the problem is in your own community, much less for children in South Africa. Fortunately, there are people who are aware of the problem and create awareness for the cause. Enter the See Me Project. The See Me Project is an annual photography contest and the brainchild of filmmakers and Levity Foundation co-founders, Mark Williams-Abrams and Addison Brown. In a partnership with Nurturing Orphans of AIDS for Humanity (NOAH), and with sponsorship from Kodak, Brown and Williams-Abrams issued 300 cameras to AIDS orphans in South Africa. "We asked them to go into their communities, homes and churches and take pictures from a positive perspective on how they were living," explains Brown. "We ended up with 8,000 submissions that [Mark and I] narrowed down to 300 submissions."

From that point, the 300 images were narrowed down to five winners by a panel of celebrity judges, including Bill Cosby, Sharon Stone, Michael Stipe, Cassandra Wilson and Ashley Judd. "The winners received a monetary prize and we are doing a documentary for the Discovery Channel as well as a photo essay book [and] all of the proceeds will go to Noah's Orphans," Brown says. For Williams-Abrams and Brown, the success of the project is measured by the responses of the children. "We don't necessarily measure our success from a financial standpoint - but the experiences the kids have and seeing the smiles on their faces is how I see our success," states Williams-Abrams. With online voting and other countries to come, Brown and Williams-Abrams are poised to make the project even more successful in the future.
- delgie jones II

For more information or to donate to the See Me Project, visit www.seemeproject.org.

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