See the video on our participate page for an overview of what the Memory Project is and how it works. You can also see our instructions page for specifications on the artwork itself.

The Memory Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a small office team. However, our activities would not be possible without the coordination of over a thousand art teachers who help their students to participate each year.

Each year we partner with different charities around the world to create artwork for new children, and every child has a different story. Some have lost their families, homes, or countries. Others have experienced mistreatment, neglect, or deep poverty. The one thing all children in our program have in common is their tremendous potential to grow and thrive. Capturing them as works of art is therefore our way of honoring their personal journey and inner strength.

The children's charities that collaborate with us around the world photograph the children's faces and send them to us.

Some of the charities that partner with us have access to high-quality cameras and skilled photographers while others do not. We tend to accept all photos, simply because we don’t want any children to be left out. You are welcome to let us know if you would prefer to be matched with children whose photos have high image quality.

We take the children’s privacy very seriously, and we therefore do not disclose any information about their locations or the charities that support them. We also do not arrange any direct communication between the children and the students who create artwork for them.

We collect all of the artwork for the children in a given country, and we then fly to that country with the artwork in many 50-lb bags. We then visit all of the locations where the children are located to deliver the artwork in large, festive events. Finally, we make a short video montage of the delivery to share with all of the students who created the artwork. See an example of one such video on the bottom of the instructions page.

From 2006–2016, we individually photographed children receiving each piece of artwork so that art students could see proof of delivery. However, that process created many problems and was ultimately determined to be unsustainable by the charities that were partnering with us. We now create a video montage of each delivery to share with our participating art students instead. These videos do not focus on the artwork itself, but rather on the collective excitement of hundreds of children in each location receiving the artwork together. In other words, participating art students do get to see the collective delivery of artwork to hundreds of children simultaneously, but not the individual delivery to each child. See an example of one such video on the bottom of the instructions page.

We began in 2004 by having one portrait made for each child, but the charities we partnered with quickly determined that to be unfair for the children. Some portraits looked professional in quality while others had been done by beginners, and a number were not finished at all. Our partner charities therefore suggested that we have several art students create different works of art for each child. That would provide each child with a small collection of pieces honoring their identity in different artistic styles. It would also help to ensure that each child would receive artwork from at least one student, given that there are always students who fail to complete the project. We have followed that suggestion ever since, and we have found that giving each child a small collection of different portraits and identity art pieces does much more to honor their identity than a single piece alone.

In order to protect the identity and locations of all the youth in our program, we cannot arrange direct communication between the children who receive the artwork and the art students who create the artwork. However, the students who create the artwork are encouraged to put photos of themselves on the back of the artwork and trace their hand so that the children can symbolically touch hands with them. Likewise, we invite the children to demonstrate their affection and appreciation for the art students when we film them receiving the artwork. See an example of one such video on the bottom of the instructions page.