Happy New Year from Design Action!
2010 was an exciting year for Design Action — we participated in a lot of important events and had some big developments here at Design Action.
Event participation and workshop presentations
Presentation at the Western Workers Heritage Festival, January 2010, on effective graphic design and communications in the labor movement.
Visual Revolt – an emerging collective of radical artists, print makers and designers — starts meeting in March.
Paper Politics book release and panel discussion at Counterpulse, in March, to talk shop about printmaking, poster making, graphics production, and politics. Organized by JustSeeds.
US Social Forum, Detroit, June 2010: Design Action members, Josh, Nadia and Sabiha convened the workshop “Communication for Liberation.” Nadia participated in the workshop “Economic Allies – how economic alternatives can support the struggle.” Josh co-organized and did the designs for the hippest party for social justice activists, The Leftist Lounge. Design Action designed the identity system and website for the USSF.
Designed and programmed new websites in open-source content management systems for WRAP (Western Regional Advocacy Project), The Miami Workers Center, Florida New Majority, The Excluded Workers Congress, AROC (Arab Resource and Cultural Center), Resource Generation, The Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs (WCSAP), and many many more.
Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training Conference, Money for our Movements , August: DA presented an introductory workshop on designing for fundraising. We also presented a webinar on the same subject in December.
US Federation of Worker Cooperatives conference, August 2010.
Worker-Ownership & The City: A Panel Discussion on Cooperativism in Communities of Color, sponsored by the Center for Political Education. A panel discussion with Omar Freilla, Green Worker Cooperatives; Guillermina Castellanos, La Colectiva; Poonam Whabi, Design Action Collective; Michelle Matos, WAGES; Abril Suzuki, Home Green Home.
Community-based Economic Development working group in the San Francisco Community Congress: Members of Design Action participated in this Congress, seeking to create a progressive agenda for San Francisco leading up to the November elections.
Oakland Museum presentation for the All of Us Or None Political Poster Project, December 2010.
Celebrate Peoples’ History Justseeds book release at AK Press, December. Sabiha gave a delightful presentation about political posters.
Community highlights
All our clients are awesome, since you all do important social and political work. Here is just a sampling of some exciting and groundbreaking work that Design Action was able to contribute our skills to:
Chinese Progressive Association report “Check Please” about the conditions of restaurant workers in San Francisco Chinatown.
Excluded Workers Congress groundbreaking report and website on the marginalization of many sectors of work in the US.
RAN Cheerios and Lucky Charms spoofs to get General Mills to stop using palm oil from deforestation.
Tikkun Magazine (issue: Jan/Feb 2011) Completed the 25th Anniversary issue.
United States Social Forum 2010
Zero Waste Detroit Donated design to support this community coalition’s action against the world’s largest incinerator in Detroit.
Awards
2010 Akonadi Foundation Racial Justice Poster award
Design Action Expands
We are excited about the addition of three new Design Actioneers:
Ivy Climacosa, Sarah Reilly and Daniel Owens. (See Design Action Staff for bios). Each brings unique experiences and skills to Design Action to further our mission.
We needed to expand the web department to meet all the needs of all the great work happening out there – so we now have two dedicated web programmers with Daniel and Sarah.
With Ivy as our new graphic production designer, we can also meet more needs for print design work.
Design Action members
The Design Action family also expanded personally. In June, Anna was born to Daniel and Leigh, and a week later Arief was born to Inno and Kristi. Are they destined to carry on Design Action legacy?! And in December, Poonam celebrated her marriage to Steve in Dubai!