SUMMER 2022 PROJECTS
Marketing for NonProfits: Friends of Great Kids Farm
Project Leader: Dr. Jennifer Maher, English
Project Team Student Interns: Bisma Ahmed, Lujane Elkhatib, and Allison Smith
Project Description
One of the most pressing challenges for small nonprofits is harnessing communication to increase visibility and to maximize fundraising efforts. This interdisciplinary team of student researchers helped Friends of Great Kids Farm (Friends) address this challenge by developing a communication plan and marketing materials in order to better support its work for Great Kids Farm, owned and operated by Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS). Founded in 2011, Friends of Great Kids Farm works with City Schools to provide students with hands-on opportunities at the Farm, connect farm to plate, encourage environmental literacy, and promote healthy habits for the whole child (Friends’ Mission Statement). Although Friends has raised over $1 million for the Farm, it still faces ongoing challenges related to visibility, marketing, and fundraising. To support and further their mission, this CoLab team developed a communication plan and marketing materials to (1) increase awareness among BCPS teachers and families, as well as potential funders, partners, and supporters; and (2) raise funds for Great Kids Farms by engaging stakeholders.
See the movie about Great Kids Farm created by this project team: https://www.friendsgkf.org
Here are some of the postcards created by this project team to help market, promote, and fundraise for Great Kids Farm.
Below are just some of the excellent photos taken by the project team during their field trips to Great Kids Farm. They used these images to create sophisticated marketing and fundraising materials. They also created short videos for social media to spread the word about the wonderful work and community outreach activities of Great Kids Farm.
Great Kids Farm: Farmapalooza
Project Leader: Katie Hileman, Theatre
Project Team Student Interns: Jennie Hardman, Emily Taylor, and Richard Wu
Project Description
This interdisciplinary team of student researchers reimagined and reinvented an on-the-road interactive theatre performance for elementary school children called Farmapalooza. The play uses vegetable “superheroes” to introduce children to the Farm and teach them about the growing, cooking, and eating of nutritious food. The project team expanded the number of vegetable characters to make the play more versatile and dynamic across seasons; developed an engaging and interactive script to introduce children to the vegetable superheroes; and made a set of portable, fun, and colorful costumes and props for the performers to use.
Below are photos of the wonderful and colorful characters and costumes created by the Farmapalooza project team and pictures of the project team in action as they perform the play they wrote to share the vegetable characters and nutrition information with elementary school students.
Discovering Baltimore’s History Through Broadcast: A Guide to Researching Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive’s WJZ Collection
Project Leader: Kristen Anchor, Media and Communication Studies
Project Team Student Interns: Theo Reinert, Fej Torres, and Sophia Wahl
Project Description
This interdisciplinary team of student researchers explored the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive’s (MARMIA) collection, focusing on their WJZ-TV Collection which contains a/v materials including daily news broadcasts, documentary specials, sports footage, and locally produced shows created by WJZ from 1960 through 2000. Researchers explored how the collection documents the history of broadcasting in Baltimore, the history of the city itself, and the broader national context of this time period. Based on their research, the team created a webpage housed on the MARMIA website giving an overview of the collection and its significance, highlights from the collection, and direction on how to search the collection. The webpage includes both written essays and videos created during the internship. This was a unique research opportunity for our student interns, as the WJZ-TV Collection is a very rare collection— nation-wide there are only a handful of network affiliate station archives that have survived and are this comprehensive.
Watch the two videos made by the project team here:
And view their webpage to read their essays at this link: https://marmia.org/2022/06/28/umbc-interdisciplinary-colab-a-guide-to-researching-marmias-wjz-collection/
Here’s the MARMIA project team at work:
Oral Histories of the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project
Project Leader: Dr. Kate Drabinski, Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies
Project Team Student Interns: Nia Hopkins, Daniela Torres, and Maria Yiannouris
Project Description
This interdisciplinary team of student researchers examined the oral histories housed in UMBC Special Collections as part of the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project collection. This archive contains a rich collection of photographs and oral histories assembled between 1975-1981 that document the changing nature of East Baltimore neighborhoods. This year’s researchers used the oral histories to explore questions of racial and ethnic identity, urban change, and the role of storytelling in making community in East Baltimore. Based on this research and building on previous work done by CoLab researchers in 2019, the team built a public-facing website that highlights knowledge from the oral histories through research essays and new oral history interviews to explore the questions raised in the original project with East Baltimoreans today. The project created researched content for the Special Collections website to encourage researchers to use and add to the collection.
View the webpage created by the project team at: https://umbcspecialcollections.omeka.net/exhibits/show/ebdpp/oralhistories
And here are some of the photographs from the original photodocumentary project:
