Penn Medicine, while acting upon its mission to work with the Philadelphia community, provides annual grants to staff, physicians, and medical students to support their community service programs. Past programs have helped students purchase textbooks, receive SAT and college readiness tutoring, and provide outpatient care those people who would not have seen a clinician without the efforts of the Penn Medicine CAREs grant.
Last year, a CAREs grant was awarded to Tigist Hailu’s Typical Day project. Hailu, the Penn Memory Center coordinator for diversity in research and education, used the photo-elicitation project to better understand the daily lives of people with mild cognitive impairment.
Hailu gave 12 participants a point-and-shoot camera and instructed them “to capture their everyday life, things that either frustrated or challenged their memory,” she said. Hailu partnered with photographer Damari McBride, who photographed portraits of the participants to accompany the images taken by the participants themselves.
“The goal,” Hailu said, “is really to use the participant-generated images along with the quotes from interviews, and also the portraits taken by the photographer, to raise awareness about cognitive impairment in our community.”
Through Typical Day, Hailu shared a vivid and important window into the lives of friends, family, and neighbors living with mild cognitive impairment.
A public gallery of Typical Day portraits and stories opened in late September at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine and will be exhibited throughout Philadelphia once it moves beyond Penn’s campus. A more complete and permanent exhibit (with more information) is found online at www.mytypicalday.org.
— By David Ney