The Open Society Documentary Photography Project offers grants for documentary photographers from Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Pakistan. The fund awards approximately ten cash stipends in the amount of $3,500 USD each to photographers to produce a photo essay on a critical human rights or social issue in the region. Along with the stipend, successful applicants will receive two master-level workshops on visual storytelling through photography and multimedia. Watch the Open Society website for information about the next round.
The Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant is an international contest with the aim to finance talented photographers and discover new talents. A total of $4,000 will be awarded.
The Photocrati Fund offers a $5,000 grant to a photographer to undertake an important humanitarian and environmental photography project. Our goal is to identify outstanding photographers and to provide the resources necessary to pursue projects that will have a tangible and positive effect on the world.
The PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards identify outstanding work done by photographers in collaboration with nonprofit organizations worldwide, with prizes ranging from $2,000-$15,000. The application period begins in October.
The Soros Justice Fellowships Program’s Media Fellowships is for individuals with distinctive voices proposing to complete media projects that engage and inform, spur debate and conversation, and catalyze change on important U.S. criminal justice issues. Deadline is in October. Watch the Open Society website for the next round.
The Rory Peck Training Fund makes hostile environment training affordable for freelancers. Since its launch in 2000, the Fund has given over 500 bursaries to freelance journalists, photographers, cameramen and filmmakers, enabling them to gain the vital skills and knowledge needed for work in hostile environments. The Trust works with five approved course providers. You must take your training with one of them, but it is up to you which one.
Rory Peck Trust offers individual grants to freelance newsgatherers and/or their families who find themselves in a critical situation. This includes freelancers who have been threatened, imprisoned or injured, forced into hiding or exile, or killed.
The Tim Hetherington Grant is an annual grant awarded to a photographer to finalize a project on a human rights theme. It is open to professional photographers who have participated in a recent World Press Photo Contest. Applications are accepted in October every year.
I am thrilled to be starting my first crowd funding campaign with the new site, IndieVoices and I’m incredibly grateful to The Photo Society, for selecting it to be among the first that they launch. The New York Times ran an interview about this project. Read more about it here.
This is an important story I began with The Nature Conservancy and the Northern Rangelands Trust about indigenous communities uniting to combat poaching in Northern Kenya. If this is an issue you support, please share this link. My stories will focus on the indigenous nomadic communities of Northern Kenya on the frontlines of the poaching wars and their efforts to preserve community cohesion, ultimately the best immunization against forces that threaten their wildlife and their way of life.
Commercial poaching organized by sophisticated heavily armed criminal networks and fueled by heavy demand from newly minted millionaires in emerging markets is devastating the amazing mega-fauna of the African plains. It is entirely possible, even likely, that if the current trajectory of death continues, rhinos, elephants and a host of lesser know plains animals will be functionally extinct in our lifetimes.
Much needed attention has been focused on the plight of wildlife and the conflict between heavily armed poacher and increasingly militarized wildlife rangers. However, the compelling story of indigenous communities caught in the cross-hairs of the poaching wars, and who may hold the key to saving Africa’s great animals, is largely untold.
The vast arid landscape of savannah, thorn-scrub and forested sky islands is populated by 14 indigenous semi-nomadic ethnicities– Bajun, Boni, Borana, Giriama, Maasai, Ntorobo, Njemps, Ormoa, Pokomo, Pokot, Rendillie, Samburu, Somali, and Turkana. Healthy populations of elephants including some massive tuskers roam this region while endangered black rhino, Grevy’s zebra and Hirola antelope hold on in globally significant numbers. But armed poachers taking advantage of the porous borders of Somalia, and South Sudan put wildlife and people at grave risk, increasing instability, inter-clan conflict, and lawlessness. While government and private conservation organizations fight to strengthen anti-poaching efforts, communal cohesion with and between communities is the fabric upon which conservation depend.
The Northern Rangelands Trust is a collective of twenty-six indigenous groups covering 2.5 million hectares of Northern Kenya. Through their efforts communities have begun to lay down their guns, relying on dialogue rather than warfare to settle inter-tribal conflict and collectively manage wildlife within their lands. They are beginning to reap the benefits of their efforts as both conservation and tourism dollars flows into this extremely poor region. And by managing grazing jointly they can better safeguard against the unpredictability of drought and climate change. Poaching now threatens their recent successes and may rip apart fragile communities and permanently end a nomadic way of life.
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