Victory Programs is a Boston-based nonprofit that for 40 years has worked with homeless individuals and families. Many of their clients have issues with substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and mental illness. I’ve had many dealings with them over the years; either covering their programs for other agencies and foundations, or working for them directly.
This year, in what I hope will become a yearly tradition, we set out to do something special for all the mothers currently in their shelters and engaged in their programs. Along with my daughter, L.A. based photographer Molly Cranna, we set up a studio in one of their Roxbury shelters and spent 3 days over the Mother’s Day weekend taking portraits of mums and their kids. With me shooting tethered to a laptop, Molly was able to quickly process the raw files, send them wirelessly to another laptop and burn CDs on the spot, enabling each mum to leave with a CD of photographs of her and her children. The staff had rented a bounce house for the back yard and set up barbecues and face painting for the families and made quite an event of the whole affair.
It was a pretty grueling 3 days for Molly and me, but I think you can see from this sample that the event was a major success. These women are struggling to scrape their way back to some sort of normalcy, and living with kids in shelters can be a pretty grim existence. On this day they all looked proud, radiant, and hopeful. I think it was memorable for them, and I know it was an unforgettable experience for my daughter and me.