Rondey Rascona is a internationally renown, award winning photographer with decades of commercial experience in the ad and humanitarian industries. He holds the prestigious Photographer of the Year: Deeper Perspective honor from the Lucie Awards. He has been covering stories and creating amazing bodies of work for Food for the Hungry for roughly the last 13 years. He also happens to be a dear friend and Photographer in Residence at The Paradigm Project. How we landed Rodney as our Photographer and how he agreed to be such an integral part of our team, I don't know. But I figured it was time to write a few things about his work, the man that he is and how thankful and blessed we are to have him with us.
This is just one image from a body of work he did in Haiti shortly after the earthquake in 2010. This collection represents exactly what Haiti needed at the time and still desperately needs today: hope. This collection is, in fact, what won him the Lucie Award later that year and is currently being featured in galleries all around the world. See his full collection here.
I recently met up with Rodney in Nairobi, Kenya with his team of fellow filmmakers on their current accross-the-world project for the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Rodney spent months working with the GACC to plot out and map the creation of the film they are shooting that will cover a multitude of countries from Peru to Kenya to India and others. The story of this film will cover the global issue of how 3 billion people in this world still cookover an open fire for every meal, but yet its much more human than that. A problem that affects 3 billion people that can be so monumental that you become detached, disinterested and unmoved. Rodney and his team will be building a story through a lens that always speaks loudest and most powerfully to us: the individual human lens and more specifically a mother and her daughter as they are the ones most affected by cooking over open fires.
I can't wait to see how this film turns out and how it speaks to our hearts. No it is not Kony 2012. There may not ever be anything like Kony 2012 again, but this story is important and it needs to be told. Kudos to Rodney and his team for taking on this journey. I wish them the best on their journey and eagerly await to see the powerful story they create in the end.
--Greg Spencer, Director of Marketing and Business Development, The Paradigm Project