Award recognition: The Side Show Awards / Silver / Social Good

The client: My neighborhood in Portland.

The mission: Help neighbors of color feel supported, respected, and seen in the emotional days after the killing of George Floyd.

The complications: It’s easy to do more harm than good when addressing a topic this painful and deeply rooted. At the same time, silence is a form of participation.

The work: Together with my neighbors, I painted Portland’s largest Black Lives Matter mural, a 336-foot artwork that explores a history of systemic racism in one city, one street, one block—ours.

The work functions as a 200-year timeline, with each 16-foot-tall letter relating a story of White riots and Black exclusion laws, busing and bulldozing, predatory lending and predatory police. The stories are visceral and grounded. They use active voice, plain language, census data, and my own secondary historical research to bare how the residents of our street and our neighborhood participated in the city’s larger story.

The impact:

• Over $16,000 raised for local anti-racist nonprofits.

• Thousands of visits week after week including a student-led protest march.

• Earned media across The Oregonian, KGW, KATU and Instagram.

• A Side Show Award (Silver) in the Social Good category.

My collaborators: More than a dozen neighbors and friends.

My role: Creative direction, writing, researching, painting, project management, fundraising.

Visit the mural website for videos, photos and full text.

The client: Google.

The mission: Promote safe practices at Google construction sites worldwide.

The complications: The audience sees signs and warnings at work all day. They’re busy. And they speak a half-dozen languages with varying levels of literacy.

The work: A series of posters so clear and visual that they lose none of their fun in translation.

My collaborator: Giuseppe Lipari.

My role: Concepting, writing, pitching.

The client: VMware.

The mission: Inspire 25,000 VMware employees to stop using single-use plastics at the company’s offices around the world.

The complications: Employees had more important things on their minds than the small plastic items that can feel incidental and inconsequential in their daily lives. And many parts of the company had already begun planning unrelated environment-focused events around that year’s official Earth Day theme, “Protect our species.”

The work: An integrated campaign that turned obstacles into opportunity. Uniting the two eco-messages through video, onsite posters, email, internal social media and employee events.

My collaborators: Luke Heyerman, Vanessa Duff, outside production house.

My role: Concepting, writing, onsite collaboration with production house.

The client: PwC.

The mission: Use data from a recent study to tell a clear and compelling story about the nature of opportunity in America.

The complications: The massive data set presented findings across dozens of economic, health and education metrics for every ZIP code in the country. But it did not come with defined conclusions. To succeed, my art director and I would have to wade into the spreadsheets, make sense of what we found and collaborate with the client’s data scientists to ensure our thinking and execution were sound.

The work: A hybrid infographic/article combining data visualizations and data-based storytelling. A piece that is easy to skim and understand without losing the nuance underneath.

My collaborators: Vanessa Duff, the client’s data scientists.

My role: Research, writing.

The client: The Standard.

The mission: Show consumers and potential business clients that The Standard knows how to set insurance bureaucracy aside and treat people with compassion.

The complications: Compassion can mean very different things to the groups included in the audience. Corporate HR departments, corporate employees, and regular people looking to buy their own insurance have wildly diverging needs and pain points. And these concerns can change depending on the type of insurance they want.

The work: A series of videos and web assets that serve as an anthem to The Standard’s values. They begin and end with emotional hooks, and in the middle, they include terms to speak to specific audience concerns.

Collaborators: Vanessa Duff.

My role: Concepting, pitching, writing, editing.

The client: Molina Healthcare.

The mission: Connect with potential ObamaCare shoppers before they make a choice on the largely brandless healthcare marketplace.

The complications: The audience had heard a lot of empty words from big healthcare companies. They didn’t know that Molina is a family-owned business that means what it says about compassion.

The work: a bilingual series of television spots and digital ads that defined compassion in more familiar terms.

My collaborators: Marla Caceres, Lauren Stegmeyer, Brian Riley.

My role: Concepting, writing, pitching, editing, on shoot collaboration with director.