It’s perfectly fitting that Amber Parham’s photo graces the cover of a book about hope, family and neighborliness.
In both her personal and professional life, Amber leads with love and looks out for others, and it’s a quality she and her husband Fred are instilling in their daughters, six-year-old Payton and three-year-old Mardie.
Shortly after the pandemic began last spring, Amber, a photographer, read an article about the Front Steps Project, started by two women in Massachusetts “to highlight the faces of our community during a time when we might not see them.” Hundreds of photographers around the world joined the movement, capturing, from a safe distance, images of families on the front steps of their houses.
Amber was intrigued and posted on social media, asking if local families wanted to participate.
“No one wanted to do it,” she says with a laugh. “I couldn’t get people to bite.”
Then, a few yesses turned into more, which turned in to people contacting her to take their photo. At times, she photographed ten families in a single day. Her Front Steps Project Facebook album of nearly two hundred households offers a beautiful glimpse into this uncertain time, as does her photo of a Milwaukee-area family that serves as the cover of the Front Steps Project book.
“When you look at the entire book, you see where people’s minds were at the time, experiencing their reality of what that time was like,” she says. “Everyone’s experience was so different, but we were all in this together.”
For the Parhams, the pandemic has meant time together in their Glendale home, where she and Fred, who works as a software engineer manager at Kohl’s corporate, and their girls have hunkered down for the past year.
“We love Glendale,” says Amber. “We love our neighbors. It’s extremely diverse.”
Diversity was important in choosing where to raise their daughters. Growing up in Kenosha, Fred was one of the only Black kids in his school, and the population of Monroe, Amber’s hometown, was even more predominately white. They wanted a different environment for Payton and Mardie.
Prior to having kids, both Amber and Fred lived in downtown Milwaukee, where they were, coincidentally, neighbors without realizing it.
“Before we even knew each other, we always lived about a block away from each other,” she says.
While they’d bumped into each other a bit, it wasn’t until she saw him DJing at the Iron Horse Hotel that the two connected, exchanging numbers and ultimately going on a date.
“It’s crazy how things work out,” she says.
Milwaukee is still special to the couple, and now to their girls. They love to go to brunch together downtown, and most summers has them heading to festivals like Festa Italiana.
“Downtown in the summer is so awesome,” Amber says. “But we are also very much homebodies. We find so much comfort being at home and we don’t require much more excitement than what we have at home.”
This summer, Amber expects things to be low-key — with some hidden benefits for her kids.
“What they’re going to do in the summer is get bored,” she says. “It’s so important that they learn what to do when they’re bored. They learn about themselves, and so much more.”
They’ll also see their mom continue to do important work in the community, as she has for the past six years with Hydrate the Homeless MKE.
The initiative started after Amber learned that a local day shelter was in desperate need of water. Before then, she was unaware that water could be hard to come by, so she started dropping off cases of water. The following year, she began posting on social media, asking if others wanted to contribute. They did, and their support has grown every year. Last year, even though Amber and her team of volunteers couldn’t deliver water personally, they raised $15,000 to serve local shelters and pantries.
Amber is excited to jump back into the work this year, and believes it’s important for her daughters to understand the impact everyone can have on their community.
“I hope they see that it’s about loving neighbors, loving people,” she says. “This is how you treat people, with love and respect.”
– Katie Vaughn
Photos by Amber Parham.
Katie Vaughn is the editor and co-founder of Northerly. She is a University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University-trained journalist with experience as a writer, reporter, editor, blogger and author. She lives in Madison with her husband, daughter and son, and is always up for an adventure.