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Working on moving hand-written notes & screen shots into blogposts.  Should be updated shortly.

Week 8 Pt. 1 Outside-of-Class: Article Readings

More Bang for the Buck

Increasing productivity in non-profit sector.  Sometimes must increase costs to increase productivity to decrease cost per outcome.  Examples of JumpStart, Teach for America, & YearUp showed they increased their productivity by investing in best practices, investing in staff & critical activities, managing costs aggressively, & measuring progress.  While all three measured costs & tracked outcomes, they did not go the step further to measure cost per outcome.  Some reasons for this were cited as limited funds & lack of pressure in the nonprofit sector to track productivity.


Disability Etiquette

Provides a guide to interacting with those with disabilities.  I thought this was a great little read of how to interact with people with disabilities without being so accommodating it's disrespectful.  I face this a lot in my job as a sales associate at a local secondhand store & think this will be quite helpful to treating all individuals with optimal respect and making sure my workplace is ADA-compliant.

AIGA Event: Aaron Draplin

On Thursday, October 2nd, AIGA Central PA hosted designer Aaron Draplin at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.  Draplin is most known for his colorful and brilliantly simplistic logo designs.  

via Boardistan.com

Draplin's presentation was a humorous, tongue-in-cheek account of his ascent to design success.  While poking fun at himself, he told a pretty inspiring story of humble beginnings to design master.  Like the old artifacts of design Draplin is inspired by, a few of the gems I pulled from his awesome were...

• Sketch, sketch, sketch!
• Do iterations—let the design evolve within the Illustrator file
• Scavenge for old artifacts of design
• Say yes more than you say no—Make changes; remember who pays the paycheck
• Make good work for good people

All these points I plan to put into action in my own design education/career, & some I've already adopted.  Sketching A LOT definitely produces greater concepts and designs.  I've seen this firsthand when I made it a point in my Visual Communications class to sketch tons of different ideas instead of focusing on trite variations.  I found my designs were better thought out & easier to develop further.  This was followed pretty naturally by doing iterations in digital form.  

I collect a lot of design things, especially vintage designerly things I find at Goodwill, so I was happy to see Draplin does the same thing & uses his findings to inspire his work.

The last two I took as challenges for the future, either while in the workplace or while freelancing.

Week 5 Pt. 1: Campus Project Introduction

For this project, myself, Quang, & Marleigh will be working with Dr. Nadine Gardner to create collateral for her sustainability conference later this month.  Dr. Gardner is part of Millersville’s Center for Sustainability, and integral to its main project, Terracycle.  We’ve yet to speak together as a group with Dr. Gardner, but so far it seems our project will be focused on terracycle on-campus & within the homes in the community.  We'll be keeping a blog on our collective group efforts over here for this several week project.

Week 2 Pt 1 Outside of Class: Our Closet & Public Interviews

After refining some questions, we sent out our public surveys (made on SurveyMonkey) via Facebook Tuesday night & emailed a few interview questions to Our Closet.  

The public survey was divided into 4 sections & looked like this:

By Wednesday we had received a decent amount of responses & attempted to tabulate & begin our graphic tabulation.

Sorting water-, shelter-, food-, support-, & clothing-related responses

Sketches for an infographic-esque tabulation

Completed tabulation

Kayleigh also emailed Our Closet the interview questions I had come up for them last class.  The following is our email interview with Anisha Sinha, program director at Our Closet.

Our Closet is a volunteer-driven organization that provides clothing to vulnerable Philadelphians and their families free of charge by way of operating pop-up shops throughout the city, in partnership with community-based service providers. Our pop-up shops are set up to simulate a true shopping experience that one might have at any other store; the only difference is that our items are all free of charge. We have no eligibility requirements, and no referrals are needed to access our services. Our goal is provide this service to people in a dignified manner so that the shoppers in our pop-up stores can meet a basic need and receive clothing with respect and pride. Since it’s founding, Our Closet has distributed more than 30,000 articles of clothing to more than 7,000 shoppers in the city.  

Your website says you "provide clothing in [a] dignified manner..." Can you elaborate Walk me though a shopping experience at Our closet. The dignified shopping experience is what we feel really differentiates us from other free-clothing providers in the city. Although the clothing we distribute is free of charge, we want it to feel as much like walking into any other store. We set up the shop to mimic retail facilities, with hanging racks, a checkout counter, mirrors, and tables to display clothing. While each shopper comes in with a unique set of needs, each person can expect to be greeted warmly by a volunteer, offered assistance while shopping, and receive individualized attention from volunteers in the shop. Our volunteers ask shoppers questions to get a better idea of what they are looking for to help locate items that might work and put together outfits that our shoppers can feel confident and excited in. During “check out”, volunteers collect some basic demographic information from our shoppers while folding items into shopping bags, to complete the experience. These small, one-on-one touches help create a warm, welcoming, and dignified environment for shoppers.

Where do your shoppers come from? Do you serve only the West Philadelphia community? Do you get andy clients from across the river/travel further? 

Our two current pop-up shops are located in West Philadelphia, though we actually see shoppers come in from a number of different neighborhoods in the city. One of our main goals is to eliminate a lot of the red-tape that community members often struggle to navigate when trying to meet a basic need, so we do not have any eligibility requirements for our shoppers. This means that really anyone in need of services is welcome to come to our shops, and we do see a good number of people that hear about our work and travel to West Philadelphia to receive clothing. In the future, as we grow, we would like to take our pop-ups to more neighborhoods in the city so community members do not have to travel to receive services.

How does clothing change a person's attitude and life? Any particular stories you'd like to share? Clothing really plays such an interesting role in how we are viewed by others, and more importantly, how we view ourselves. In thinking about our own closets, there are certain articles of clothing that we just feel great in, and that translates to feeling and exuding confidence when we wear these items. For many of our shoppers, who are struggling to make ends meet as it is, feeling confident and excited about a new outfit, accessory, or pair of shoes, can really make a difference as they work towards achieving other goals. They might feel more confident walking into a job interview or to work; it may inspire them to put themselves out there in a way that they hadn’t previously; or, it might simply just meet one basic need, so that they can better focus their energy and resources on other things, like housing stability or paying utility bills.One other interesting component of our work is that the clothing we do distribute is fully donated, and many of our clothing donors actually volunteer in the store itself. We all have ties to certain articles of clothing – our first suit, our favorite pair of jeans, a piece of jewelry that makes us feel special – and when we begin to outgrow these items, it is often hard to part with them given the memories. However, when these items are recycled and bring a similar level of excitement to someone new, that experience can be equally transformative for a donor or volunteer. One of our favorite stories:Aaron first came to Our Closet in the fall of 2012 while living in a nearby men’s shelter. While clothing is what initially drew him to the program, he quickly began getting involved with other aspects of Our Closet, helping to set up and break down the store and explaining our services to other community members. Week after week, Aaron would come down to the shop, sometimes gathering five items for himself or his family, and other weeks, simply helping other community members find items for themselves. In November 2012, we held our annual Coat Day, and as we were cleaning up, a gentleman named Virgo rushed in; he was from the same shelter as Aaron, but had custodial duties at the shelter that prevented him from coming to Our Closet earlier. Virgo was very disappointed to see that we had already distributed over 400 coats, and that there were no coats remaining that would fit him to keep him warm for the impending winter. While we worked in the moment to connect with his case manager to see if there was any way for him to come to the shop earlier the following week to take advantage of what was offered, Aaron did something remarkable; he reached into his shopping bag and handed this gentleman the beautiful shearling coat he had just received from the store, an hour earlier. The moment was incredibly powerful, and tapped into the immense level of generosity, self-awareness, and connection Aaron had in relation to Our Closet. As needy as Aaron was, he saw Virgo as “needier” and was so appreciative that Virgo was cleaning the very shelter where Aaron himself resided, he felt the urge to say thank you. Shortly after this incident, we stopped seeing Aaron at Our Closet every Tuesday. We did, however, meet a new shopper who introduced herself as Aaron’s mother. We learned that Aaron had secured a job nearby, but had suggested that his mother come down to Our Closet, as she herself was facing a period of instability. Aaron had fulfilled his basic need of clothing, used his time, energy and money wisely and found gainful employment. He had moved on from needing the services of Our Closet, but expressed his gratitude and continues to refer others to Our Closet. Are there similar groups serving this need in other areas in Philadelphia? There are a number of agencies that provide free or low-cost clothing in Philadelphia, but none that have no eligibility or referral requirements, or operate like a pop-up shop, as far as we have seen. However, we do believe that collaboration in these efforts is critical, so we are continuing to explore organizations similar in scope to ours to see if there are potential partnership opportunities we might be able to pursue. Is there anything else about your organization that you'd like to share with us? Our Closet is a relatively young organization that in a few short years has grown significantly. We are now ready and excited to begin expanding our efforts – we want to engage more volunteers and more donors so we can better serve even more Philadelphians in need.

Week 2 Pt 1 In-Class: Our Closet Concepts & Sketches

During an hour-long brainstorming & sketching session in class, Kaleigh & I explored some concepts to lead our t-shirt design.  

I started attempting to get the creative juices flowing by sketching out some simple ideas, as can be seen on my sheet of chaos below.

The three main concepts we came up with were...

1) Clothing as one thing we can help with, out of a myriad of daily issues

2) Clothing with compassion—one helping another

3)  Dignity & satisfaction—feelings those who shop at Our Closet can feel upon leaving the shop, as opposed to what one might feel receiving hand outs.

We then decided to take the latter two & combine them into one concept: 

COMPASSION | DIGNITY | SATISFACTION

This combines the compassion donors & volunteers feel that urges them to give to the cause, the mutual dignity felt by both giver & receiver, & finally the satisfaction the shopper feels leaving with their new clothing.

My initial design was to illustrate this flow of compassion to dignity to satisfaction using Our Closet's hanger logo & wrap it across the shirt.

Kaleigh & I decided to go with her design, which follows very closely the idea I had sketched out previously, just with a different layout.

Week 1 Outside of Class: Our Closet Interview Questions Draft

To help learn more about the non-profit and about related public opinions, I came up with a few interview questions over the weekend.

For the non-profit I wanted to ask...

Your website says you "provide clothes in [a] dignified manner...."  Can you elaborate?  Walk me through a shopping experience at Our Closet.

Where do your shoppers come from?  Do you serve only the West Philadelphia community?  Do you get any clients from across the river or that travel further?

How does clothing change a person's attitude & life?  Any particular stories you'd like to share?

Are there similar groups serving this need in other areas of Philadelphia?

For the general public I wanted to ask...

If you were homeless or had fallen on bad times, what would be your top 5 most crucial needs?  (This would be to discover whether or not the public views clothing as a top necessity.)

Approximately how much money do you think you spend on clothing in a year?  (To discover how much of a financial burden clothing could possibly be for someone.)

What sort of assumptions do you make about a person based on their clothing?  (To prove clothing is crucial to fitting in & being successful in society.) 

Week 1 In-Class: AIGA Philly "Design for Good" Non-Profit Brainstorming

My teammate Kaleigh & I decided for our first project of the semester to do the AIGA Philadelphia "Design for Good" t-shirt contest.  First step was to find a non-profit we were both passionate about & wanted to design a t-shirt for.  A few that caught my eye were Career Wardrobe, TreePhilly, Ready, Willing, & Able, Philabundance, Our Closet, Neighborhood Bike Works, Gearing Up, Earthskeepers, Clothes-Pin, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Back on My Feet, ActionAIDS, Achieveability, & Philly AIDS Thrift.

We decided on Our Closet, which operates a weekly pop-up store in West Philadelphia, providing free, high quality clothing with a personalized & dignified touch.  I work part-time at a local Goodwill & also have volunteered during my winter breaks at the Bowery Mission (which operates it's own clothing closet cheekily dubbed 'Blessingdales'), so this non-profit very much interested me.