Critical Exposure, Inc.

Founded in 2004, Critical Exposure addresses the striking racial and socioeconomic inequities in education. Critical Exposure's co-founders recognized that as a society, people had tacitly accepted the reality that youth in low-income communities had limited access to educational opportunities and resources, relative to those in wealthy communities. CE envisions a world where historically marginalized youth become leaders equipped with the skills to make their schools and the world around them more equitable and more responsive to their needs. Both founders shared a passion for photography and chose visual storytelling as a key tool for engaging youth.

Since 2004, Critical Exposure has provided experiential leadership and learning opportunities to more than 2,600 youth of color in DC. Today, our goals remain consistent with our initial vision: (1) teach youth of color to be change agents by building their skills, knowledge, and confidence in youth organizing and photography; (2) develop the capacities of youth of color to shape narratives about them; and (3) drive concrete changes in school environments by supporting youth-led campaigns that work towards education equity and close the opportunity gap.

Critical Exposure engages more than 140 DC youth each year in a continuum of arts education, youth development, and youth organizing activities that develop their identity, creativity, and civic leadership/organizing skills. Our continuum of programs include the following:

Our In-School Programs are implemented with the active support of principals, either in partnership with classroom teachers, during lunch, or after school. These models provide different benefits: the classroom-based programs allow CE to reach youth who cannot participate in afterschool activities, while our increased focus on the lunch and afterschool times provides flexibility beyond the parameters of a particular class. Youth learn about the history of photography and youth-led social change, how to document their lives and write powerful captions, how to identify a specific challenge that is impacting their education, and how to work collectively to find a solution.

Our Youth Internship is an introductory, 12-week afterschool program for DC youth of color who are interested in using photography to document issues directly impacting their lives and to create counter-narratives that more accurately represent their own experiences. This program facilitates positive identity development by encouraging youth to reflect on their individual experiences and to identify commonalities. These discoveries serve as a necessary foundation for youth of color to change the dominant narrative told about them. The Internship’s curriculum also includes the most technical photography skills. This program prepares youth to join our Fellowship Program.

The Fellowship is an advanced-level, year-long program heavily focused on youth organizing and empowerment, with youth frequently returning for up to three additional years. During the Fellowship, CE staff works intensively with youth to apply their learning through a collective, youth-led, citywide campaign aimed at securing the implementation of a positive solution to an issue they select. Fellows’ most recent campaign focused on the need for DC public schools to expand access to financial literacy training to be consistent with the graduation requirements of most other states and to mitigate the racial wealth gap.

Our Summer Programs are taught by youth from CE's Fellowship Program or alumni who CE hires and trains as facilitators through our comprehensive Summer Youth Facilitator Institute. This peer-to-peer learning is one of the highest rungs of our youth leadership ladder as it elevates youth from being participants to facilitators, supporting their long-term personal and professional development.

Critical Exposure staff and volunteers play an integral role in fulfilling our mission, working closely with youth to help them develop their artistic skills and enhance their leadership capacity. All programs are facilitated by experienced Critical Exposure staff with backgrounds in youth development, photography, and organizing.

Critical Exposure partners with DC public and public charter high schools and other youth-serving organizations and forges strong community alliances to engage youth, provide forums for their voices to be heard, and build collective power. We greatly value opportunities to collaborate with peer organizations to become a stronger, more impactful organization.

To diversify and enrich our workshops and activities, we work with organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Women Photojournalists of Washington, and Click DC/Focus on the Story. These partnerships introduce youth to the work of documentary photographers and the issues they cover. We also partner with organizations like Exposed DC and Click DC to host exhibits across DC for youth to showcase their photos and writing.

In recent years, Critical Exposure has worked to cultivate strategic partnerships with organizations like the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates (DCAYA) and Mikva Challenge, with whom we partnered during the 2017-18 school year to co-host a youth-led mayoral forum: pooling our complementary resources, skills, and expertise to enable CE youth to build their power and position themselves to play a larger, more visible role in city politics.

In 2019, Critical Exposure became a founding member organization of a youth-of-color-led coalition called United Leaders 4 Freedom as well as joined the DC Girls Coalition. These coalitions provide youth with platforms to build collective power that impacts systemic change in their schools and communities.

Since 2004, Critical Exposure has provided experiential leadership and learning opportunities to more than 2,600 youth of color in DC.

Because of our work during the 2018-2019 school year,
• 100% of youth in our programs expressed confidence using a digital camera.
• 81% expressed confidence using different techniques to compose a photograph
• 92% of youth expressed confidence taking a photograph that tells a story
• 96% of youth understand how power and decision-making works within the school system
• 92% of youth understand how to make change within the school system.
• 100% of youth believe photography is a tool that can be used to support change in a school or community.

Past youth campaigns have helped to secure commitments to:
• Increase training and accountability for school security guards.
• Pilot the use of restorative justice programs in DC Public Schools.
• Provide funding for a new school library.
• Establish a new ethnic studies class.

Other recent accomplishments include:
• Amir, a recent Critical Exposure graduate, went to Baltimore to photograph the protests and tell the story of what he saw. His photographs and writing were featured in an article on Think Progress, “How Young People of Color are Documenting Injustice One Photo at a Time."
• The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities named Critical Exposure a Youth Program Award Finalist three times, consistently recognizing us as one of the top 50 arts-based programs in the country.
• Critical Exposure has received the DC Mayor's Arts Award for “Outstanding Contribution to Arts Education.”
• Critical Exposure has been selected three times by the Catalogue for Philanthropy as one of DC’s best small nonprofits.

In the coming year, Critical Exposure will refine our work in schools to strengthen structures that directly involve youth of color in the processes of shaping and making decisions at three DC high schools. We will also focus on our work with two youth-led coalitions in Washington, DC, which provide young people with platforms to build collective power that impacts systemic change in their schools and communities. Finally, we have engaged in the Vote16 campaign in DC, which works to extend the right to vote in local elections to young people 16 years and older.