Shaver is the founder and executive director of The Oldham Project, a nonprofit photography organization that provides free portraits for people with life-threatening or terminal illnesses. Her most recent campaign is aimed at women who have lost their hair from the effects of chemotherapy.

“It’s important that when they walk in the door that they see that they’re going to look just as beautiful as these women do,” Shaver said.

“The whole purpose of this project was to empower women and to make them feel beautiful when they feel not beautiful.”

Shaver’s new campaign, “Be Bold, Feel Beautiful,” began July 1 and will go through September. Shaver’s goal is to take 200 portraits of women with cancer, in partnership with Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Mid-Michigan.

Shaver said initially she hoped for at least 20 interested participants, but the response has blown her away.

“We’re at 51 right now,” she said. “We’re not doing any marketing other than these women spreading the word themselves.”

The ages of the women have ranged from 26 to 71 years old, and one of her sponsors, Douglas J Aveda Institute, gives each woman a make-over session before the portraits.

“They don’t get enough pampering — they only get picked and prodded and poked,” Shaver said. “To just have that hour of luxury has been a real treat for them.”

Every woman that Shaver takes a portrait of has her own experience, but common to all is the desire to feel beautiful again.
“When you take away the hair, the eyelashes and the eyebrows, they feel like they lose everything,” Shaver said. “They
feel like they lose their personality.”

The summer campaign is encompassed by The Oldham Project, which Shaver established in March 2008.

Shaver said the project is a tribute to her sister-in-law’s two sisters, who died from breast cancer and whose maiden name was Oldham.

“People don’t take enough or have enough fine portraits done,” Shaver said. “That was the tragedy sitting at my sister-in-laws’ funerals. They didn’t have any really good portraits of their family or these women. They certainly did not have enough of them.”

Shaver would like to expand her children’s program within the Oldham Project and possibly do a men’s version of “Be Bold, Feel Beautiful.”

“I see this over the next few years becoming a nationwide campaign,” she said.

Okemos resident Hannah Schmucker, who is Shaver’s daughter, said she was not surprised by the project since she knows her mother’s heart is in it.

“She’s the kind of woman where if she puts her mind to something, she’s going to get it done and she’ll go to any sort of measure,” Schmucker said.

During the sessions, Shaver said the women open up and share parts of their lives and their feelings from no longer having hair.

“One woman described, ‘I look in the mirror and I feel like an alien,’” Shaver said. “I wanted to do everything I could to make them feel the exact opposite.”

Shaver began a blog at the start of “Be Bold, Feel Beautiful,” and said it has become a vehicle for the women who are further along in their journeys to encourage those who are experiencing the earlier stages of cancer.

“That to me is the most amazing part — that these women are empowering each other,” Shaver said. “I just kind of step back and let this thing happen by itself — it’s taken on a life of its own.”

When she started the campaign, Shaver said she knew she was doing something exemplary, but as she interacted with the women at their sessions and heard each of their stories, it transformed her outlook on life.

“I will never be the same person because of the courage of these women,” Shaver said. “They are giving me a much bigger gift than I am giving them.”

In general, Shaver said pictures are taken at celebratory occasions, such as birthdays or graduations. She still looks at her sessions as a celebration, but of a different kind that takes into account their situations.

“Some of these women know when they come in here that they’re not going to make it, and that’s a little bit tougher for me,” she said. “Sometimes I truly have to turn away and look the other way until I get my composure back.”

Shaver also is involved in the national nonprofit organization Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, which is dedicated to taking pictures of stillborn infants to memorialize their lives and help with the parents’ healing process.

Her involvement is personal, after having a stillborn baby girl at 38 weeks about 29 years ago. She said now she regrets not taking any pictures, as her biggest fear is that she will forget her daughter’s face.

“It’s the only pictures that those families will get of those babies,” she said. “These people will never get anything else except for these pictures that we provide for them.”

Janet Martinich, director of operations at Hospice of Lansing, said she often sends referrals to Shaver and is an avid supporter of her endeavors. Martinich and Shaver also worked as nurses together prior to Shaver’s photography venture.

“(Shaver is) a quiet, unassuming person, but she does powerful things with her actions,” Martinich said. “(She) has opened my eyes to the possibilities to embrace life and to live it because we don’t know what’s happening next.”

Although Shaver has been a studio photographer for the last 10 years, she said her time is increasingly consumed by her involvement with the nonprofits and is taking fewer formal portraits.

“People think that their lives are bad, until you read some of these stories,” Shaver said. “It really does give you a different perspective — it can’t help but change you.”

The portraits from “Be Bold, Feel Beautiful” will be displayed in the Greater Lansing community to visually raise the public’s understanding of women with cancer and to highlight October, which is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.