We welcome one of our own to Mission Forward this week: inclusivity advocate and graphic designer, Eleni Stamoulis. She joined the Mission Partners team in 2017 and since that time, she has been involved in an extraordinary array of client and partner projects. In brand refreshes and rebrands, website redesigns, and all kinds of mission-critical campaign elements, her voice has become welcome counsel for ensuring that the projects that we take on at Mission Partners are as inclusive and accessible as possible.

We talk about Eleni’s journey as a designer and the traumatic brain injury that sent her on her path of growth and life-long learning. We talk about the power of design to transform ideas and beliefs. As she says, design isn’t just about what’s on the page. It’s about everything around us that is designed to affect change. We’re grateful that Eleni is using design to affect change for good. 

She is deep into the final stages of her own MFA, where her thesis is focused on the experiences of Black, Brown, and Latinx students in design education. As such, she’s currently performing a research project that aims to understand the role race plays in the educational experience of graphic design students in the United States. Are you a design student or educator? Visit EleniStamoulis.com today and submit your response. She promises it won’t take more than 10-15 minutes of your time. Click the link to learn more!

Along the way, Eleni recommended some fantastic resources we’d like to amplify:

• The Black Experience in Graphic Design: A Diasporic Anthology of Design Practices & Experiences by Anne H. Berry on Kickstarter — The project has just reached its goal, but the resource will be incredible and we encourage support of the work!
• extra bold: a feminist, inclusive, non-racist, non-binary field guide for graphic designers — You can get it from the usual places, but buy from your local bookstore if you can!)
• Design Explorr — “DesignExplorr’s goal is to create opportunities that allow underrepresented youth to participate in design activities.”
• Creative Reaction Lab — “Our mission is to educate, train, and challenge Black and Latinx youth to become leaders in designing healthy and racially equitable communities.”

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward