The VII Foundation trains and equips emerging visual journalists from communities underrepresented in the media. These practitioners have a front-seat perspective on urgent challenges that concern us all. The VII Foundation teaches essential skills and strategies to ensure the truth is documented and made available to a global audience seeking to make decisions and choices based on facts, not hearsay.  

Our training is tuition-free and conducted by leading professional journalists who have worked for decades on the frontlines of some of our societies’ most complex and difficult challenges. In this era of an underfunded, dying global media enterprise, our trainees help ensure the global conversation continues and is fuelled by first-person reporting vs. unsourced, uncredited rumors and factual manipulation. In addition to empowering over 1,200 new voices in journalism from more than 100 countries, we host public conversations and critical debates that ask tough questions about the context, purpose, and impact of images. We create large-scale and long-term documentary projects, exhibitions, and films that reveal complex realities; advocate for change; and serve as resources for policymakers, the public, and journalists worldwide. 

The VII Foundation consists of VII Photo, acquired in 2023, along with three educational initiatives: VII Academy, VII Community, and VII Insider.