Our Story

Hey guys! Welcome to the Teenage Paparazzo Empowerment Tour page! We're making it our mission to deliver the messages in Teenage Paparazzo to high schools across the country. In Teenage Paparazzo, Adrian Grenier (HBO's Entourage) gets behind the camera to explore the concepts of celebrity and fame in today's media saturated society. The documentary interviews scholars, celebrities, and paparazzo themselves in order to take an in-depth look at why and how people consume popular culture and are affected by media saturation and technology. The Empowerment Tour will bring together teachers, students, local media, guest speakers, and educators at high school campuses across the country. Schools get the opportunity to screen the film, engage in a live exhibit of art reflecting themes presented in the film, and engage in local media events. We're reaching 80 schools (that's 50,000+ students!) in a 6 month period, beginning in the fall of 2012.

The Impact

The Teenage Paparazzo Empowerment Tour gives students a multitude of experiences, from the film to the art to the educational curriculum that we bring to each school. The Empowerment Tour unites schools with local media experts and engages teachers and students in a dialogue about themes including role, identity, interpersonal interaction, and accountability in the digital age. To encourage further study, we're donating media-related books to each school that reflect key themes presented in the documentary. The tour is important because it calls attention to society's media saturation, and encourages students to become aware and active consumers of media, as opposed to passive receivers of messages. Young people consume over 40 hours of media a week (not including cell phones and the Internet) and are bombarded with advertisements, solicitations, and entertainment; some fun, but much of it inappropriate and negatively influential. Without strong media criticism skills, the effects of this barrage can become destructive. It's not a mystery that technology and the Internet have allowed us all to become creators of media, so it is important to have a dialogue with young people who are growing up as the first generation of digital natives. The tour empowers students to utilize the tools of communication provided by technology and the Internet to respond and be constructive citizens of the world, responsible for the images they disseminate. Our mission is to empower students to explore the way we look at the world, the way we look at ourselves, and the way we look at others.

What We Need & What You Get

We're raising $50,000 in order to get the tour van that we'll taking on the road, and using to transport the art exhibit from school to school. If we don't reach our goal for the tour van, we're going to use the money to buy the books that we're donating to each school's library. In addition to than the satisfaction of helping to educate thousands of young minds, we have some pretty awesome "Thank You!" gifts.

Other Ways You Can Help