The Bright & Beautiful Project

Overview

"Left-behind" children are those of the migrate workers who seek employment opportunities in big cities, a phenomenon not uncommon in rural China. Compared to their male counterparts, the young girls who are left behind usually struggle more for their parents' attention, are less likely to finish schools and are at higher risk of crime. The Bright & Beautiful (有灵且美) is a non-profit organization that aims to help these girls in rural China, by bringing art, creativity, mindfulness, attention and love to them. Between 2014 and 2017, the team had successfully hosted more than 6 summer and winter arts camps and other creative workshops partnering with local schools in rural areas, served over 400 girls, and connected more than 50 volunteers from around the globe.

As part of the promotional campaign for the arts camps on Indigogo and Kickstarter, I created this parallax scrolling site, to support volunteer recruitment and fundraising for the summer arts camp, which was later hosted in Yunnan China in 2015.

My role

Sharing the same passion and goal, I joined the team at its early ideation stage, and helped form the organizational vision and the operational strategy from the start. During my time with the team, I established our visual brand, created campaign materials, e-commerce sites, promotional landing pages and was driving the creative directions. I continued doing pro bono creative consulting work two years after the team relocated to China. "Write Her a Postcard" and the "Story-T" are two of the events/products which I helped plan and create.

Story-T

From hosting the summer camps in rural Yunnan, China, we connected with a group of talented young women embroiderers who were crafting amazing artwork that were extremely undervalued. We hand picked over 200 pieces of embroideries from their creation and sewed them onto T-shirts, with a QR code on the back linking to their own personal stories and dreams. This idea was a hit on social media and at our offline events and the story-Ts were sold out soon after. All profits were given back to each embroiderer to help them with buying textbooks and pursuing their dreams.

Write her a postcard

In conjunction with the Story-T, I illustrated and designed a set of postcards. One full set was in exchange for a free one for someone to write to one of the young embroidery workers — the protagonists in the Story-T stories. We collected close to 100 written postcards filled with kind words and encouragements which had brightened up or could have later changed their life.

Arts Camps

Collaborated with the Pulsera Project, we brought the handcrafted bracelets to the first-ever Bright & Beautiful summer camp to girls in Guizhou, China, combining the two good causes together. This project built a bridge between these girls in the villages and the outside world, and reminded them that all of us are a irreplaceable part of the global community.

• Storytelling
• Creative Campaign