Mormon Youth: Lights to the World

Dear Friends:

Here is a simple way you can really really help promote positive images of members online!

More Good Foundation, as you know, is working to provide honest seekers with correct information and accurate perceptions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members.  We have found that many of the public at large equate us either with the Amish, or with the polygamous groups that have recently been in the news.  In spite of the rise to stardom of many LDS people (David Archuleta, Chelsie Hightower, etc.) and the general knowledge that they are Mormon, people still aren’t figuring out who we are.  Because of this, we desire to add additional images to all the articles on all of our sites to show Mormons in action, going about our daily routines, jobs, church work, recreation, and milestone events. We’ve just created a site called LDSImages dot com where we will place these photos, so that those Googling Mormon images can find something positive that reflects our enjoyments, families, friends, activities rather than those that confuse our image with other religious groups.

This is a request that you will network with your own friends, even forward this message, so that we may gather in some great photos.  We need the images in jpg format, and you can email them to me at email@moregoodfoundation dot org. These can be pics of your own family, in your home or yard; photos of weddings, missionaries, humanitarian aid projects, groups of kids playing at games or sports, family home evenings, proms, seminary/institute gatherings, reunions, anything at all that shows who we are and how we look.  If you have a couple of paragraphs of content to go with the photo, it would be awesome. If not, send them anyway. If you send us a picture, that means we have your permission to use it.  Please include any info identifying the scene–”Joe and Lizzie Sikes upon their marriage at the Provo Temple, 4/08.” We will upload images without identifying individuals, with generic captions such as “Mormon family temple wedding,” or with first names only, so let us know your preference.  If you have images of Saints in other countries, we would also be very interested in using those permissible as well.

Whether amateur photographer, scrapbooker, or professional, we’d love your clean, crisp photos of Mormons in action.  If you are an artist who does charcoal or pencil drawings of Mormons, or who is willing to share any other images of members’ or Church-related images, please feel free to contribute.

By the way, if you are posting photos on Flickr, or other photo-sharing sites, and if you don’t have descriptions on them, friends of other faiths may not stumble upon them.  If you share them with us so we can add them to our repository with titles and descriptive post, they will make a difference in what is visible to those seeking to see who we are online.

Thanks so much for all your help. Please circulate this everywhere you can within the circles of your LDS community.