2010 will be a big year for Liberty in North Korea! With a goal of raising $250,000 next year to help rescue 100 refugees out of underground southeast Asia, LiNK has begun the holiday season with a goal to raise the first $50,000. Accompanied with a staged release of videos, I designed and coded the TheHundred holiday campaign website to provide a landing page for our marketing efforts. Please take a few minutes to visit the website and learn more about the North Korea crisis. :)
After spending the last 6 years of my creative life behind a computer, I’m looking for the little inspirations and opportunities, big and small, to just create by hand. I started a postcard writing bond with a handful of friends and have now begun creating hand made and mixed technique postcards. Here are some hand colored b&w photo collage postcards I sent out this week.
Are you creative and want to exchange some postcards? Let me know :)
Thanks to @causecast for hosting an awesome Holiday Party this past Thursday. It was really great to meet some other non-profits in the LA area. Everyone check out www.causecast.org!
In the left is a soldier’s hat, slightly faded, olive green, and with a red band around the top.
In the right is a pair of soldier’s boots, uncomfortable, simply made of hard rubber, and appear to fit someone the size of a small teenage boy.
Now some may struggle with finding any emotions while looking, wearing, or holding such items. To me they represent years of suffering, a firm suppressive grip on a beautiful culture, and reason to keep pressing on.
It wasn’t till we presented these items to a refugee that I gained a new perspective of them. To a refugee named Shin, a man who spent his entire life in a North Korean prison camp, these items represented both a sense of fear and wonder. Having been born, raised, starved, tortured and emotionally deprived in a concentration camp, for a reason he’ll never know why, these items were something that were so far out of reach.
When he picked up the hat he said he felt a sense of fear, holding an item that he had never been so close to and only feared from afar, he put the hat on and wore it around the office impersonating a soldier. After picking up the boots, Shin explained that he was forced to make them while he lived inside a barbed wire and fortified world.
It wasn’t till Shin sat these items down and walked away from them that I realized the lack of freedom they represented and the simple freedoms we all have. Having once feared them and been forced to create them, Shin now had the littlest freedom to simply just walk away….. to leave them behind and not have to fear them anymore…..and to this account, I hope LiNK can continue to press forward and bring these freedoms to the refugees we find.
For these simple freedoms can make life worth living for…
Here is another booklet that was created all in a nights work… :)
One of the challenges we faced with the program was the cost of printing on a short run of 250 items. To solve this issue, we ripped out the color on the interior pages but left them still intriguing enough to stay attractive. In accomplishing this we were able to slice the printing cost in half.
I’m proud to say that I took part in the LiNK 2009 Benefit Gala a few weeks ago. It turned out to be an inspiring event, not only for myself, but for all the guests that attended. We used the Livestream.com platform for the webcast of the evening and it turned out very professional and clean. Take a look at the replay of the night!
The simple side of me really wants to turn off my phone and get one of these instead. Pretty simple and cheap.
“Peek is a simple gadget that allows you to send and receive email and text messages while you’re on-the-go. For as little as $15 a month you’ll never miss another email again.”
