How one ‘Humans of New York’ photo is helping Brownsville students see Harvard

One photo on Humans of New York is letting kids from Brownsville visit Harvard for the next ten years.
That may be slightly overstating it, but the Mott Hall Bridges Academy raised 14x more than its principal, Nadia Lopez, set out to raise when she launched an Indiegogo campaign to set up a fund to send middle schoolers to check out Cambridge.
The fact that Brandon Stanton, the photographer and blogger behind Humans of New York, got involved with raising money, appears to have helped a lot.
Stanton took this photo of Vidal Chastanet, a student at the school. Stanton includes a bit of text with his images. With this one, he quoted Chastanet as saying the principal of his school, Lopez, is the most influential person in his life. After releasing the photo, Stanton visited the school and got involved with helping to promote Lopez’s Indiegogo campaign, according to the Associated Press.
51,465 people gave $1.4 million in all.
Mott Hall Bridges Academy is a public, STEAM-oriented middle school. DNAinfo ran an interview with the principal on Sunday where she discussed the importance of the positive attention that the photo brought to her school.
Lopez says the challenge of working with a group of students who come in with a high concentration of low-proficiency is that educators are made to feel as though they are not making a dent. “It’s such an airtight environment,” Lopez told DNAinfo. “If no one outside of this tells me I’m doing well, I don’t know I’m doing well. Because I’m constantly reminded that I’m not doing well.”
Read the full interview