Tackle food insecurity with design and creativity
Calling all creators, makers, and innovators. The world needs your help.
If you’ve been following along with Make a Mark, either in person or via Medium, you know the emphasis that we place on community. We believe that our biggest value doesn’t just come from providing websites, branding and strategy, but from the beautiful byproduct of community.
The Make a Mark Community
Our true value is bringing people together from seemingly different worlds to focus intensely on solving a problem through telling beautiful stories, respecting each others strengths and appreciating one another as human beings.
With the make-a-thons, we have been able to build this community of creatives and nonprofits. These are two seemingly separate groups of people with very little overlap in their daily lives. Each side has their own strengths, skills and passions so by bringing together these people, we are building and then subsequently reinforcing a strong community of talented altruistic individuals in this world.
Our makers and nonprofits build relationships that extend far beyond the 12-hour event. Not only do the nonprofits get a broader understanding of the power of design and technology for the humanitarian sector, they themselves shine a light on the problems that those in our towns and cities face — problems that can be hard to imagine. Read more about our community.
We can do more
Over the past year, we’ve started to realize that makers want to be engaged throughout the year, not just for one day, to help serve more nonprofits with their skills. We also know that many makers that want to participate are going unreached because they might be unavailable on the day of the make-a-thon in their community or live in an area that doesn’t yet have a Make a Mark chapter.
On the other side, we are constantly saddened that we have to turn down deserving humanitarian efforts because of the nature of the event. We like to keep our events small so we can focus on quality and give the organizations that we select our full attention.
We have learned that right now we simply can’t reach all causes in all communities, but we weren’t happy with that answer. We started Make a Mark to build an equity of design and technology for all organizations and efforts, no matter how small. We also believe that there are people out there that want to do more and serve more.
So, what is this new project?
Earlier this year, we came up with the concept for the Global Awareness Challenge. The Global Awareness Challenge is an opportunity for the world’s maker community — designers, developers, podcasters, videographers, writers, and more — to create projects that can dramatically improve the efficacy of the work done by many nonprofits all at once.
The challenge? Help nonprofits tackle some of the myths, misunderstandings and complexities associated with food insecurity and those facing hunger, by creating resources and tools they can use in their work.
Food insecurity is a complex issue, and while many organizations across the globe are working hard to solve it, they need support. By contributing your own insight, and ideas, we have a much better chance of solving this problem as a unified community.
We like to think of food insecurity as a puzzle that has many pieces. At times these puzzle pieces are missing or far apart and the puzzle may seem forever incomplete. However, by providing your unique perspective you are adding pieces to this puzzle to make a clearer picture. By putting your talents toward a solution, you are creating a glue that will hold this puzzle together into the future.
Step 1: Read the article
For the challenge, we worked with a panel of experts to prepare the resources you need to dive in on food insecurity. The first step of participating in the challenge is to read the article.
Step 2: Ideate, Collaborate, Create
You can work on your project as an individual or a group. You can work with friends, coworkers, your partner or even your mom!
What you create is up to you: Want to build an interactive microsite? Create a mini documentary? Design a protest poster or infographic? Have other ideas on how to spread awareness? We can’t wait to see! Read some suggested prompts and ideas for projects.
Step 3: Submit your project
Once your project is ready for submission, we just need a few pieces of information and resources from you so that we can publish your project in the challenge showcase.
The projects and resources that you create will be made available on our site, to all nonprofit organizations around the country and the globe, including those in the Make a Mark network. We will work with nonprofits tackling food insecurity to implement what you’ve created to help these nonprofits spread awareness as they work to solve some of the biggest problems in our world.
Submissions are published under CC0 1.0 Universal license. For each submission, Imperfect Produce will donate 10 pounds of produce to Farming Hope, and Hungry Harvest will donate 10 pounds of produce to growingSOUL.
Want to learn more? Visit the Global Awareness Challenge page for all the details.
Have questions? Send us an email at hello@letsmakeamark.org. To stay up to date, subscribe to the newsletter.
