In this episode, Nour Chamoun, the co-founder of Scopio interviews Gerardo Moreira – the co-founder of All Forty & Megan, its chief Marketing officer. All Forty is a platform that supports black businesses & professionals. It brings innovation and accessibility. The company’s biggest challenge for now is to raise funds to pay for its volunteers. All Forty use the power of crowdsourcing reviews to provide feedback and direct relationships from B2C. They believe that a representation of a community-based company should go beyond traditional media platforms and they recommend directly messaging potential clients through social media along with mouth to mouth introductions: the more you talk about your company's mission, the more people will know about it and will start using it. 

“From liberals and conservatives, whites, and blacks, rich and poor, and I found myself lost in between it all.” said Laurène Southe, a creative writer and photographer based in Vienna, Austria. Her focus was always creative writing such as poetry and spoken words due to the lack of songwriting opportunities in the country that she currently lives in but she believes that when she starts college in England, more opportunities will become available. 

Laurène is finding a way to communicate poetry in a way she feels comfortable in, she doesn’t need to overthink about it, she communicates her work with people who are interested in her art but at the same time, faces her biggest challenge, self-critique.

Jeremiah Chapman, was born and raised in Massachusetts. He is an athlete, artist, consultant and activist who realized that ideas, concepts and stories of young black folks are being unheard.

In the midst of global protests, Jeremiah founded Black Culture Weekly, an initiative that has several areas of focus: training young black journalists, highlighting and guiding Black political candidates, increasing Black representation in the workforce by providing access to job opportunities, supporting black owned businesses by offering them free press and much more! In order to fulfill this huge mission, one has to re-energize. That's why, in his free time Jeremiah produces music, he considers it very therapeutic and peaceful.

Ola Alghazzouli is an American Syrian certified personal trainer, functional fitness specialist and certified swim instructor.  She graduated with a B.S in Biology and a health promotion minor and launched Swim4Akhirah in 2020 to speak up about swimming for Muslim women and those that desire modesty within the swimming world. Ola also started a series of podcasts called “Purposeful Fitness” where she explores health and fitness topics that helps everyone stay active, fit and healthy.

After being bullied over wearing a Burkini, Ola decided to share with Scopio some of her photos to deliver a message to the world that people should not judge Muslim women based on their looks & their religion but rather on what they’re capable of. These women want to & can be represented in the swimming world whether they are swimmers or certified swim instructors.

Joshua Bamidele is a Nigerian amateur photographer who started out his journey by borrowing his friend’s camera on weekends. Brandon Woelfel is one of his main inspirations. The 20 years-old dreams to become a professional photographer, inspiring therefore young Africans. He loves taking portraits, travel, landscape, and food photos and always prefers the photo to be dramatic & moody. Joshua’s plan is to build a strong portfolio to get paid opportunities. He advises future photographers to “just start from where you are, with what you have even if it’s only with a mobile phone.” Joshua continues with “be different, cause there’s over 10,000 or more photographers on this planet earth, what makes you stand out is your style.”

“I want to make a change, a shift in the way of thinking especially for the Non-Profit Organizations.” said Eveline Gerristen, a portrait photographer from Amsterdam. As an artist by heart, photography is a way to express herself and to connect with the world around her.

Eveline has been traveling a lot since 2019, working for NGOs. She has a passion for street photography and loves meeting new people from different backgrounds! Eveline believes that we can help non-profit organizations fund their projects through positive storytelling. She considers it a very efficient strategy to reach out to the young generation on social media during these tough modern days.

Dino Rovolis is a Canadian-Greek self-taught photographer who mainly focuses on fashion, portrait and travel photography. He always had a passion for art but did not know how to elaborate it, at first. He studied architecture than moved to communication until he figured out once through his job at a Clothing store that he is into modeling. 

Dino started modeling and building connections. After a while, he wanted to do more and he wasn’t into some of the photos, others were taking of him so he decided to buy a camera and start taking his own photos, experimenting with them and build his own model/photographer portfolio. Dino always try to play with colors, shadows and angles when creating a photograph. He believes that there has to be depth in the image, it has to evoke a certain rawness & mood.

Although it might seem like most models are born with natural confidence, Catherine shares that it has less to do with confidence and more to do with the desire to express their creativity. She is a Quebecois photographer that she was most creative as the subject. Find out more about her perspective on self-photos here.

2020 pushed us to be more than we ever could have imagined. When you think of the circumstances we all faced, it would have been an accomplishment just to get through this year, but our community of over 13k photographers and 17k businesses have proved that even during a global pandemic they will not sit back and let their circumstances define them. Success could have seemed doubtful, but today we are here to tell you that success is up to you. 

Because of talented artists and businesses that wanted to see a better world, we have been able to use images as a powerful voice for change, and this year hit a record number of 15k submissions per day. Many of the images received this year carry a message of strength, as the artists who captured them had to be more creative and more vulnerable than ever to capture moments from 2020.

This year, Scopio's library of diverse images have been used in articles to educate on diversity, senior homes to brighten spirits, and soon our images will be up in museums so that the memorable images of 2020 can landmark a piece of history we experienced together.

At 11 years old he spent 5 hours recreating dover fairy port with Legos after a family holiday to France. Visualization has been key in Hamish's life, which is why he took photography. The vision is what drives him to create the photo, but in the moment he focuses on the shot and its in those moments that he adjusts and gets the shot. Watch the video to hear the full story.