Createathon on Campus

Last week I participated in the school of Mass Comm.'s Createathon on Campus. This is something that has been happening in the professional arena for 10 years now and this was the first one on a school campus. Design firms would rally local non-profits with little to no marketing budget and for 24 hours would do pro-bono work for them. It was rough at times, but it was really cool too to see a bunch of people rally together and use the gifts and talents we have to help the non-profit companies help other people. It was a awesome feeling to know that I was helping to impact dozens of lives, maybe even more.

My group was working for Jackson-Feild Homes, which is an organization that helps neglected and abused girls in the Foster care system. These girl's stories are incredible! One girl never got a birthday present until she was in the program at 16. Another had her second kid at 17, and her mother didn't even go to the hospital in Petersburg to see her, even though the mother lives in Richmond, because she didn't feel like riding the bus! WHAT?!?! But despite their previous lives, and because of the work of the staff Jackson Feild Homes, these girls are incredible strong in character and are getting the tools and skills they need to make the choices that can break them out of this cycle.

Our assignment was to make for them a promotional video, which was made difficult because we weren't allowed to video tape or record the girls. So we created videos of other volunteers reading scripts from these girls' lives. We focused on their hands to address a more creative presentation and also to keep that idea of anonymity. We started at 9 am and finished all our work at 3:30 am the next morning, having completed not just one video but 5 different video clips and suggestions for their homepage.
I designed this homepage and also a suggestion for a mini page that could host blogs from the girls. The donors have been very active in Jackson-Feild and also the lives of these girls and we thought a blog would be another way that the donors could participate, keep in touch, and also see the effectiveness of their donations. I don't know if the videos are online yet, we suggested that they put them on Youtube, but I don't know if that's happened yet.

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For more information about Jackson-Feild Homes check out;
http://www.jacksonfeild.org/