Raising the volume
Whether in Nicaragua, Philadelphia or South Africa, award-winning videographer Eli LaBan, KLN ’17, thrives on finding the commonalities between people.
I’m really trying to find a way to collaborate and give people a platform to tell their own stories.”
Eli LaBan
Currently a Princeton in Africa Fellow, LaBan is working for Gardens for Health International outside of Kigali, Rwanda. He creates multimedia content to support the nonprofit organization’s mission of training rural farming families to grow and eat their own nutritious foods.
“About 85% of the population are subsistence farmers but many children are malnourished due to a lack of education on nutrition and a lack of access to a variety of nutritious foods,” he says. “My role is to spread the word about the organization and the families it serves.”
LaBan discovered his love of on-the-ground reporting as a student in Temple’s Study Away in South Africa program, where he made a documentary about young musicians. He later won an Emmy for his work on NBC10’s Generation Addicted web series that investigated Philadelphia’s heroin epidemic. And he went on to win a National College Emmy for a project that recorded the cultural artifacts of an endangered indigenous community in Nicaragua.
—By Elisa Ludwig