Next Gen Photo Benefit

I was very honored last week to participate in and help host/curate an amazing event for UNICEF’s Next Generation.  The event was started two years ago by Next Gen member and photographer Mia Baxter (who has a great new site with Next Gen founder Jenna Bush called the Novo Project and you can read their recap of the event here).  Our third annual Photo Benefit raised $25,000 towards UNICEF’s Tap Project, supporting water, sanitation and hygiene projects in Togo, Vietnam, Mauritania, and Cameroon.

It is pretty crazy that in 2012 783 million people still do not have access to safe water and 2.5 billion, nearly half of the world’s population, live without proper sanitation.  Inadequate access to safe water together with poor hygiene practices, kill 4,000 children every day.  Children, and particularly girls are extremely affected by this issue because schools lack private and decent sanitation facilities and once girls reach puberty they can no longer go to school.  Next Gen’s current goal is to raise $100,000 for the Tap Project and it’s amazing that this event got us a 1/4 of the way there!

I donated the below images to the show and was excited to see that they all sold and helped to raise money for this great cause!

Can’t wait to start planning next years event! There are lots of great photos from the night on Next Gen’s Facebook Page, which you can check out here.  If you missed the event and want to contribute you can still do so here.