Antoinette Carroll (Graphic designer, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab) and BGSU graphic design lecturer Amy Fiedler discuss the importance of individuals taking action to solve problems affecting their communities, specifically in regards to training and challenging Black and Latinx youth to become leaders designing healthy and racially equitable communities. 

Transcript:

Introduction:

From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.

Intro Song Lyrics:

I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.

Jolie Sheffer:

Welcome to the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American cultural studies and the director of ICS.

Jolie Sheffer:

Today, we are joined by Antoinette Carroll and Amy Fiddler. Antoinette is a graphic designer, entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, a nonprofit youth led social impact collaborative. Her work focuses on designing more just and equitable communities and organizations. Amy is a lecturer in graphic design here at BGSU. Thanks for taking the time to be here with me today.

Antoinette Carroll:

No problem. I'm excited to be here.

Jolie Sheffer:

Antoinette, can you start by telling us how you came to found the Creative Reaction Lab in St. Louis? What led you to do this kind of work?

Antoinette Carroll:

So Creative Reaction Lab was founded in response to [inaudible 00:01:05] Ferguson, with myself being a former Ferguson resident, as well as a former head of communications at a diverse inclusion nonprofit and I was really interested in how do we convene community members to actually come up with their own interventions to address issues around race and other issues around division within our city.

Antoinette Carroll:

And so, Creative Reaction Lab actually originally started as a 24 hour challenge. There was no intention for it to be a business. I technically had a full time job with a paycheck, but when I actually brought people together, which were activists, designers, technologists, and they came up with their own interventions, actually five and all were activated in St. Louis within a year. I started to see that there was actually some power in what we were doing and how we were starting to shift the conversation from just a simple dialogue to how do we have dialogue and action at the same time.

Antoinette Carroll:

Fast forward to where we are now. We no longer do 24 hour challenges, but we still have creative problem solving, design, community voice central to the work that we do and understand that community members are the best ones to come up with the interventions to address the problems impacting them because they actually are closest to the approaches that will help them. They understand it more deeply to really create that systemic change that we truly need for a community growth.

Jolie Sheffer:

Great. And Amy, how did you come to be interested in design for social good?

Amy Fiddler:

I think design for social good is something that I've always had an opportunity to work in that space because being a part of academia, you have an opportunity to do projects on the side or bring them into the classroom can have a positive impact, but what is really important is finding the right ways to do that so that you're not swooping in as this authority figure.

Amy Fiddler:

And so, bringing Antoinette in and learning and researching more on those themes really helps us understand how to do that better.

Jolie Sheffer:

And what do you both think is so important and relat