PARSONS AND OSF: COMMITTED TO GLOBAL CHANGE

Partnership Following Five Years of Successful Global Projects

In 2009 Parsons and OSF fellows Michael Ballard and Claudio Midolo worked with the Stop Stock Outs campaign in Lusanka, Zambia. (Photo: Parsons)

NEW YORK (July 26, 2012) - Parsons The New School for Design and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) are celebrating five years of successful collaboration by dramatically broadening and deepening the OSF Fellowships in Information Design program at Parsons. Since 2007, the two groups have worked together to send a select number of graduate students from Parsons MFA Design and Technology program to work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across all aspects of design, including branding, identity re-design, design workshops, and helping organizations come up with ways to leverage digital technology to increase the effectiveness of their advocacy campaigns. Starting this summer, Parsons will more than double its work with these NGOs and involve many more students in the problem-solving process. This expanded work will enable Parsons and OSF to leave an even greater impact in the countries where they operate.

"Our grantee organizations advocate passionately for the advancement of health and human rights in very challenging contexts," says Brett Davidson, Director of the Health Media Initiative of the Open Society Foundations. "The partnership with Parsons gives them access to the cutting edge technology and communications expertise they need in order to have an impact."

Over the past five years, the Parsons OSF Fellows have engaged more than twenty NGOs in more than fifteen countries on a broad range of public health and human rights issues as part of a summer program. Starting with the 2012 program, which is currently underway, Parsons OSF Fellows will still spend the summer working on-site with NGOs, but the projects will extend into the full academic year, where they will be the focus of design studios with other Parsons students that will take a broader view of the issues. In the fall, the students will work as a team to identify actionable, long-term solutions to those problems, and the fellows will return to the field to test program prototypes in 2013. A second design studio will be offered in the spring, in which students will continue to work the same NGOs to further refine and develop the work based on the field test.

"NGOs often don't know what's possible. We try to meet the needs they communicate to us, while opening the door to something more exciting," said David Carroll, Director of the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at Parsons. "The OSF partnership makes it possible to reach people in the developing world in a way that was impossible before."

This year, Parson student Paweena Pranchanronarong will be working with Centro de Estudios Para la Equidad y Gobernanza Los Sistemas de Salud in Guatemala City, Guatemala, an organization that campaigns for the right to health care, to help them design a system to transfer health records with mobile phones. Student Hazel Bala will be working with the International Children's Palliative Care Network (ICPCN) in Assagay, South Africa, which is focused on caring for terminally ill children, to enable the young people served by ICPN to tell their stories, as well as also designing a mobile record-sharing system. Jennifer Matsumoto will be working closer to home at the New York offices of Universities Allied For Essential Medicines to aid in their work ensuring access to low-cost medication.

In previous years, students have helped an LGBT advocacy group in South Africa rebrand themselves to appeal to a wider audience; designed the branding and outreach strategy for a Croatian organization working on rights for disabled people; spearheaded an extensive web re-design for a Georgian addiction research center; and created an SMS-text-enabled system to alert the public, government officials and the media to medicine stock outs in Africa. To learn more about the program, visit http://osf.parsons.edu.

About The New School
The New School, a leading progressive university in New York City, was founded in 1919 as a center of intellectual and artistic freedom. Today The New School is still in the vanguard of innovation and experimentation in higher education, with more than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students in design and the social sciences, the humanities, management, and the performing arts and thousands of adult learners in continuing education courses. Committed to public engagement, The New School welcomes thousands of New Yorkers yearly to its celebrated public programs and maintains a global presence through its online learning programs, research institutes, and international partnerships. Learn more at www.newschool.edu.

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