WCA recently submitted over a dozen hand drawn and decorated portraits of children as part of The Memory Project. The Memory Project is a charitable nonprofit organization that invites art teachers and their students to create and donate portraits to youth around the world who have faced substantial challenges, such as neglect, abuse, loss of parents, violence, and extreme poverty.

“We want the portraits to help the children feel valued and important, to know that many people care about their well being, and to act as meaningful pieces of personal history in the future.  For the art students, we want this to be an opportunity to creatively practice kindness and global awareness,” explains the organization via its website. 

To do this, they receive photos of children and teens from global charities operating residential homes, schools, and care centers in a number of different countries every year.

The Memory Project then provides participating art teachers with full-page color prints as well as digital copies of those photos, along with plastic sleeves to protect the finished portraits.  Our art teachers then work with our students to create the portraits, and Memory Project hand-delivers them to the kids.  In many cases, they try to have several different portraits for each child, created by different art students and based on different poses.

Finally, they make a video of each delivery to share with all of the art students and teachers involved.  Since 2004, The Memory Project has created more than 100,000 portraits for children in 43 countries. We have shared WCA’s video with you below.