FX offers two mentoring sessions each year:

Academic Year Mentoring: FX’s 30 academic-year mentees meet weekly on Saturdays for four-hour sessions over 32 weeks. Mentees are matched 1:1 with a mentor/adult role model, providing individualized guidance for the duration of their FX experience. Mentees choose to work with either “traditional” film photography or digital photography. Throughout the year, mentees have opportunities to go on photo walks around the city, field trips to explore new areas like the Marin Headlands and cultural institutions like SFMOMA, and take part in unique photo-based opportunities like constructing a community altar for Dia de los Muertos at the Oakland Museum. Also, every holiday season, mentees participate in a special FX project known as “Envision: Community Portrait Day”, a free day-long event that invites local families, many of them low-income and first-generation, to get their portraits made by our mentees in a professional photo studio. In the culmination of the year and their efforts, mentees are showcased in our annual art auction at SOMArts Cultural Center, where their work is displayed in the First Exposures gallery space alongside their family, friends, and the public.

Summer Group Mentoring: Over the summer months, San Francisco’s families, schools, shelters, and centers struggle to find creative ways to keep underserved youth engaged. First Exposures’ summer program, inaugurated in 2014, teaches digital photography and darkroom film photography in small group settings, with two mentors and five mentees working together as a team to provide a unique shared experience and foster more peer-to-peer learning. The program serves 30 mentees over 7 weeks and concludes with a public exhibition of mentee work.