Behind The Shirt: Messy AZ

“We love to celebrate the touchdowns but we don’t want to start on the one yard line.” — Dallas Cowan
Background
The organizers at Impact AZ approached me to do a design for their 2017 class. Impact AZ is a collective of twenty non-profits with the goal of using their resources to bring a greater awareness to the ways the community can use their tax credit money. They will also be giving multiple grants to the non-profits who raise the most tax credit money.
As I was going through the list of non-profits, I saw that they were from all serving the community in different ways. Some were serving kids in the foster system, the homeless, teaching entrepreneurship in the inner city, helping sex trafficking victims and so on. Even though they were their own organization, there were all somewhat connected in the mission to help Arizona.
The Design
Over the past year, my view of impact has changed. Working with the vulnerable and least of these is messy.
I wanted to do a design that showed the individual organizations and also the unity between them. There are twenty stars to symbolize the twenty organizations in the program.
“Messy Arizona” is what I call the center because that is what it is like to work with the least and vulnerable. These organizations, and other like them, are daily working in the messiness. Even though it is messy the people still show up.
Dallas

