Capping off weeks of rehearsal, homeless teens perform “Each Tear”  at the “Night of Broadway Stars”  fundraiser at theNew Jersey Performing Arts Center.

Covenant House New Jersey has taken in thousands of homeless teenagers providing a safe place to stay, mentoring, counseling and a hope for a brighter future. Each year they partner with Broadway stars and put on the “Night of Broadway Stars” fundraiser to raise awareness and funding for these vulnerable youth. Design for Social GOOD told the story of these kids moving from homelessness to the Broadway stage as they sing, “Each Tear”.

We applaud Nancy and her enduring spirit that helped her overcome a horrific childhood. With the help of Covenant House New Jersey, she lifted herself up and is now in independent living. She fulfilled her dreams and sang on a Broadway stage and has a life of possibilities ahead of her.

Emmy nominated videographer John O’Boyle shot some of the footage for Nancy’s story and Producer Chuck Fadely brought it all together.

Covenant House used the fire tradegy to highlight the need to get teens off the streets and into secure housing and a safe environment. They gave Design for Social GOOD raw video of Covenant House President Kevin Ryan speaking about the devestation. Our researchers found compelling images of the fire aftermath and acquired them to include in the above video. Meshing Kevin’s voice with video and still images, Design for Social GOOD procuded an emotional appeal to not let this happen again.

ACE is a unique non-profit serving New York City. Their goal is to help formerly homeless adults transition to full time employment and their record speaks for itself. 73% of their Project Stay participants remain employed for at least two years after graduating from the ACE program.
Their goal for this video is to use it to communicate with supporters about their cause. Video offers them the opportunity to make a one to one connection between the people they serve and those who support them.

They chose Design for Social GOOD and our award winning team led by Emmy nominated videographer John O’Boyle to tell their story.

Here are a few ways your non-profit can use videos to help your cause.

•    Create a YouTube channel for your nonprofit
•    Keep your total video length under 3 minutes
•    Highlight individuals who have a compelling story
•    End with a call-to-action and list a URL shortcut to a page with additional information

The project was so successful that Covenant House asked Design for Social GOOD to shoot new interviews and mix them with the videos and photographs produced for the Do1Thing.org project. Covenant House President Kevin Ryan plans to show the video as he travels the country talking to churches and groups about the groundbreaking work Covenant Houseis doing to save these kids.

Since 2004 at least 300,000 people have died in Darfur, Sudan, the victims of fighting, slaughter, starvation, malnutrition and disease. Two to three million people have been forced from their homes to wander a landscape withered by drought. Widely seen as a genocide perpetrated by the Janjaweed, armed partisans from the mostly Afro-Arab herding tribes in the north, upon the non-Muslim Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit farmers, the fighting in Darfur is about scarcity as much as ethnicity. As U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon told The Washington Post, the conflict in Darfur “grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water.”

“This weather does not belong to us. It belongs to someone else. If we don’t have ice, we are going to die.” With this prediction, an Inuit hunter sums up the dire situation for the indigenous peoples who live in northern and eastern Greenland. Nowhere on Earth, perhaps, is the evidence of climate change more apparent.

The ice that covers 80 percent of the world’s largest island is disappearing at the rate of 7 percent a year, a rate that has accelerated substantially in recent years. In some places, the ice shelf is already too thin to permit the Inuit to travel to traditional hunting grounds. The permafrost is also melting, producing a land that is boggy, unstable for buildings and difficult to cross by the traditional sleds. Worst-case scenarios predict that the carbon released by the melting permafrost could equal all the carbon already in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Inuit, who survived for centuries by hunting seals and whales, are watching their way of life disappear before their very eyes.

Karabash One of the most polluted cities in the world, Karabash in the Chelyabinskaya region of the southern Ural Mountains in Russia, is burdened with the dirty legacy of copper mining, chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks. The smokestack of the Karabash Copper Smelting Works has been spewing a thick soup of toxic fumes and metal particulates into the air for almost a century. Closed in 1987 when Soviet officials proclaimed it an “environmental disaster zone,” the plant was reopened 11 years later because the region needed jobs.

Black heaps of industrial waste tower 45 feet high around homes and apartments. Recently, the new owner of the smelter, the Russian Copper Company, has modernized the plant and installed filters to greatly reduce plant emissions. But for the residents of Karabash, the contamination of the past remains ever present. The Yamal Peninsula In the language of the indigenous Nenet, “Yamal” means “world’s end.” This 435-mile long peninsula in northwestern Siberia is home to both 42,000 Nenet and the largest natural gas reserve in the world. For a thousand years, the Nenet have herded their domesticated reindeer to summer pastures above the Arctic Circle.

But now, the Nenet’s traditional way of life is threatened by warming temperatures that turn the tundra into a boggy swamp and by the world’s rapacious appetite for natural gas. With the gas wells have come railroad tracks and natural gas pipelines that bisect herding routes and cause reindeers to break legs. Fish, once an abundant dietary staple, also have diminished; the Nenet blame offshore drilling. The Ob River, which the Nenet must cross to return to their southern pastures, freezes later than ever before, forcing reindeer to forage longer in depleted winter pastures.

Design for Social Good produces video on “one of the most polluted cities in the world” featuring images by Yuri Kozyrev for Consequences by NOOR.

Karabash One of the most polluted cities in the world, Karabash in the Chelyabinskaya region of the southern Ural Mountains in Russia, is burdened with the dirty legacy of copper mining, chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks. The smokestack of the Karabash Copper Smelting Works has been spewing a thick soup of toxic fumes and metal particulates into the air for almost a century. Closed in 1987 when Soviet officials proclaimed it an “environmental disaster zone,” the plant was reopened 11 years later because the region needed jobs.

Black heaps of industrial waste tower 45 feet high around homes and apartments. Recently, the new owner of the smelter, the Russian Copper Company, has modernized the plant and installed filters to greatly reduce plant emissions. But for the residents of Karabash, the contamination of the past remains ever present. The Yamal Peninsula In the language of the indigenous Nenet, “Yamal” means “world’s end.” This 435-mile long peninsula in northwestern Siberia is home to both 42,000 Nenet and the largest natural gas reserve in the world. For a thousand years, the Nenet have herded their domesticated reindeer to summer pastures above the Arctic Circle.

But now, the Nenet’s traditional way of life is threatened by warming temperatures that turn the tundra into a boggy swamp and by the world’s rapacious appetite for natural gas. With the gas wells have come railroad tracks and natural gas pipelines that bisect herding routes and cause reindeers to break legs. Fish, once an abundant dietary staple, also have diminished; the Nenet blame offshore drilling. The Ob River, which the Nenet must cross to return to their southern pastures, freezes later than ever before, forcing reindeer to forage longer in depleted winter pastures.

Design for Social Good is working with NOOR. Noor’s mission is to contribute to a growing understanding of the world by producing independent in-depth visual reports and collectively and actively promote, exhibit and sell the work of its member photographers. Their photographers have traveled the world documenting the devastating effects of climate change and D4SG will be producing nine videos showcasing their images as well as personal interviews with the photographers.

In the weeks leading up to COP15, we will be showcasing the videos.

To learn more about the project, visit Consequences by NOOR.