Humans of New York (HONY) started with Brandon Stanton in 2013 as a photography project that documented the wide array of New Yorkers. Today, it has 18 million Facebook likes and 6.3 million Instagram followers. What makes this project so special?

Morne le Roux said, “In New York, a stereotype is that everyone is rude, but HONY gets you to know strangers. Everyone has a story, and that’s really interesting because you can make a lot of assumptions about a person by just looking at them.”

Morne, a Bob Jones senior, started her own kind of HONY: Humans of Bob Jones. In Mrs. Dauma’s Innovations class, Morne has worked throughout the semester photographing and interviewing seniors, getting a “little tid bit of information that gives you enough to know the person,” Morne stated.

The 2016 fall semester was the first Innovations class at Bob Jones. Innovations is based around a student’s project of choice, that they will carry out through the course of the semester. For example, Kouji Miyamoto’s project was to repaint the lines on the parking spots in the East View lot.

Mrs. Dauma said, “Very few of us are going to invent something brand new, but there can be lots of things innovated and improved upon in the world.”

Humans of Bob Jones, just like Humans of New York, vary in interviewees, length, and topic. Anirudh Gupta discussed his experience moving from Liberty MS, while Audrie Broadway discussed her ideas about faith and human existence.

Mrs. Dauma, said, “I think what she [Morne] is doing with the Humans of Bob Jones brings people who are maybe a little bit more on the sideline or a bit quieter and shows what cool and awesome people they are and gives them a chance to make a statement.”

Although the first ever Innovations class has ended, Humans of Bob Jones still remains. 

Mrs. Dauma said, “We have to keep encouraging people to see the connections, to see that even though you can divide our school by gender, race, religion, and all kinds of demographics or categories, we are all still human and we still have more in common than we do differences.”

There are over 1500 students at Bob Jones, and Humans of Bob Jones breathes a little more humanity into the senior class and the Madison community.