Ronnie Ellen Maher, Founder and Executive Director of NicaPhoto, is a professional and fine art photographer. Born in Brooklyn, and raised in Norwalk, Connecticut, Ronnie spent more than ten years teaching photography to disadvantaged or “at-risk” youth in various community programs throughout Norwalk, and later in Nicaragua. Ronnie first visited Norwalk’s Sister City, Nagarote, in Nicaragua in 2005 as a volunteer, teaching photography to youth. NicaPhoto was born shortly afterward as a series of photography and writing workshops for youth. For the next 4 years, while working as a professional photographer and teaching in various Norwalk community programs, Ronnie traveled to Nicaragua, teaching photography and connecting youth in the two communities. In 2010, Ronnie redesigned NicaPhoto to be a comprehensive, holistic after school program including education, art and personal development, and since then has been spending most of her time in Nicaragua.

Ronnie has a Liberal Arts Degree from UCONN with a BA in Communications and a minor in Psychology. Prior to studying photography at Maine Media Arts, she worked as a rate analyst and later as a junior level Treaty Underwriter at GenRe. Although it was not a straight path, if you asked her, she would say that everything she has done in her life has helped prepare her for the work she does today.

Arranged by Mike McFadden

Bryan Hooper’s notes on the talk:

Ronnie Ellen Maher, spoke to us from Nicaragua about the programs run by NicaPhoto, the non-governmental organization she founded and runs for disadvantaged children in the city of Nagarote.

Ronnie discovered her interest in photography in high school in Norwalk, where she was raised, and developed that further at Maine Media Workshops. In between working for financial services company, Gen Re, she pursued her hobby, which eventually became a second career. Working in Norwalk as a professional photographer led to Ronnie teaching photography to disadvantaged youths after school in a curriculum designed to stimulate and encourage interest in education, art and personal development. In the course of that program, she made her first visit to Nicaragua in 2005 to lead workshops on photography to children in Norwalk’s sister city, Nagarote.

NicaPhoto was founded in 2010 with a mission to empower disadvantaged children and their families living in the poorest barrios of Nicaragua, allowing them to reach their full potential, and in doing so, to break the cycle of extreme poverty. NicaPhoto started with 12 students and 3 staff as a formal comprehensive after-school project, with subjects covered including photography, tutoring in Math and Spanish, and a healthy hot lunch. The latter was particularly important since Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with approximately 32% of the population living below the poverty line, and many Nicaraguans struggle daily to obtain sufficient food for their families.

Over the past ten years the curriculum has evolved to cover a wide range of activities including visual arts, dance and chorus, as well as martial arts to encourage discipline and self-esteem, and organic gardening. The garden was made reality once the organization bought a one-acre lot in 2015 and developed it over the next four years along with buildings to house the teaching activities. Waste palettes from a local cement factory provided wood for shop classes, resulting in the production of furniture for the classrooms and fencing for the site. They survived the economic problems of 2018 and have coped with the Covid-19 pandemic with good hygiene practices, taking classes to students, and working closely with parents and their children over the four months they shut down. They even bought a sewing machine to make masks to protect against disseminating the virus, and they introduced dance classes given by U.S. college students via Zoom. They gave computer classes, managed to continue training staff, as well as tutor students, and are about to introduce an aquaponics program to expand their education of food self-sufficiency. In terms of numbers, they now have 150 students and 12 full-time staff.

To learn more about NicaPhoto visit their website, www.nicaphoto.org, and to view Ronnie’s presentation and slide pack, click on the following links:

Presentation Video: https://youtu.be/1WyZQQmJDJ8

Presentation slides: https://dariendma.org/wp-content/uploads/NICAPHOTO-2.0.1-FINAL-3-16-21.pdf