WHO
Seattle’s robust and active design community—with Steffanie Lorig, Terry Marks, David Lemley, Ray Ueno, Paula Rees, Jesse Doquilo and hundreds of additional AIGA Seattle members— wanted to do more to help the public. They identified specific social and health needs of teens and children. Then they developed and designed tangible, tactical measures to effect positive change for young lives. Their designer-led, design-driven organization is a more forceful demonstration of the power of the design profession than talking about it at mind- and butt-numbing verbosity conferences.

WHAT
Art With Heart is a nonprofit created by Seattle designers for the purpose of helping empower youth in crisis through therapeutic tools and programs. The program gives design professionals a tangible and effective way to bring their skills to bear upon real health and social concerns within their communities.

An easy score? [Heck] No: Design community outreach programs can begin with good intentions that are bled white by hundreds of meetings led by scores of chiefs. This means that local needs go unmet while local design talents are underutilized.

What makes Art With Heart unique is its staying power. This child of AIGA Seattle was nurtured for seven years within the local chapter before it became a stand-alone 501(c)(3) organization. Achieving the latter status meant finding its own board, raising its own funds, creating its own office and staffing up. Today, like many nonprofits, it still struggles to survive. But unlike other designer-birthed nonprofits, it is the only grassroots, social assistance organization in the U.S. created by graphic designers for the purpose of applying design and creative skills to address social concerns and meet specific human needs.

These publications help children facing crises with creative ways to relieve stress and trauma. They provide a place to record innermost thoughts, discover ways to confront fears and affirm strengths.

WHERE
Want to help? Ask your local AIGA chapter to adopt Art With Heart and quit trying the reinvent the wheel! Or … put your money where your mouth is. For $25 a month, give two homeless teens essentials for living through a Seattle winter with an “Urban Survival Backpack.” Or … $50 a month provides 30 teens facing emotional crisis a helping tool called Chill & Spill, a guided self-expression journal. Or … for $75 a month, give 90 children affected by cancer a chance to explore beauty, inner strength and personal refuge through “Self Expression” artistic workshops led by real Seattle designers and artists. And $100 per month can help 100 English- and Spanish-speaking pediatric patients find amusement, distraction, self-empowerment and improved emotional health with the wildly popular Oodles of Doodles. Corporate sponsors can finance the publication of these helping tools, too, and distribute to their area children’s hospitals.

WHEN
There is no time limit to the needs of teens or children in crisis. There is no timetable for helping or giving … except “now” and “immediately.” Get your own AIGA chapter to launch an Art With Heart in your community by contacting Steffanie Lorig (she’ll be happy to share ideas), then selling your chapter on this or a similarly effective model.

WHY
Excerpts from Art With Heart’s pitch to 2007 AIGA National Conference planners:
“According to AIGA national, one role of local chapters is to initiate activities and work with colleagues to address social issues of importance to chapter communities. AIGA national encourages such community service programs in order to increase the local community’s perception that design can effect enduring, effective and forceful change at a community level. How? By becoming indispensable. By championing the lives of those in need. By demonstrating effective and lasting change through the power of design and the talent of the design community. Designer-led public service that changes communities for the better … also generates positive visibility for our profession.”