Look for the Helpers

A Photojournalism Project capturing people doing good during COVID-19

About Look for the Helpers

Activate Good’s ‘Look For The Helpers’ Photojournalism Project is a collection of photos showcasing community members engaging in service in a wide variety of ways around the Triangle region of North Carolina.

These images highlight people coming together – amazing organizations and volunteers – to do necessary work to improve the community and help those in need during the summer of 2020 when COVID-19 and protests take center-stage. Nonprofits, schools, individuals, and groups all participated in this collaboration, which shows the importance of volunteering through crises and the community working together.

Photographer: Bisi Cameron Yee

Thank you to our Look for the Helpers partners

Activate Good would like to thank the dozens of Community Partners and their staff and volunteers as well as our volunteers for their participation in our ‘Look for the Helpers’ Photojournalism project. The work you all do lifts up the Triangle community everyday. We feel honored to have been able to capture your stories and these small moments during a historic time through this project.

We would also like to thank Papa Murphy’s Pizza, Alphagraphics, and RAD Graphics for their support of our ‘Look for the Helpers’ Photojournalism project and enabling us to share printed copies of some of these inspiring images around Raleigh in the hopes of inspiring others to keep doing good and helping their neighbors.

Reflections from Bisi Cameron Yee

On May 26, on the first day of my student internship with Activate Good, I opened the door into the Wade Edwards Learning Lab and tried to figure out how to use this space, normally filled with students and volunteers engaged in tutoring sessions or peer discussions or enrichment activities, as a jumping off point for a photographic documentary on the state of volunteerism during a pandemic.

I didn’t turn the lights on. Instead, I set up my tripod, and slowly worked my way from room to room, turning my camera toward empty chairs, vacant spaces, computers that had been powered down, dust motes caught in the angled sunlight streaming into darkened rooms. It was a sobering experience to consider how the class of 2020 and the rest of this COVID generation have had their futures so abruptly and irrevocably altered.

Over the course of the next eight weeks I photographed more than forty organizations in an attempt to capture the ways in which our best nature responded to this historic time. As I approached each opportunity, I asked myself, “What does volunteerism look like here?” The answer to that question was always different. In some places it looked like the WELL – empty spaces unable to be safely utilized in an era of social distancing. In some places there were no volunteers – only a handful of dedicated staff trying their best to do the work that hundreds had once helped with. In some places where the need was both so fundamental and so great, volunteers found ways to keep distance, took the steps necessary to keep each other safe, continued to feed the hungry and serve the sick. And there were facemasks. Everywhere there were facemasks.

But in no place that I visited was there a loss of hope. Instead I found determination. I found fellowship at six-foot intervals. I found a shared sense of purpose and a commitment to community. And I was honored to photograph it.

Looking back at all that I was able to capture, from farms to food banks, from animal sanctuaries to animal rescues, from planting flags to planting lilies, from individuals seeing a need and making a difference to groups working together to source solutions to problems such as we have not encountered in our lifetimes, I am reminded of that first day. Of that angled sunlight streaming into darkened rooms.

Look for the Helpers Photos

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