The Creative Campaign Collaborations

The program aims to foster collaboration between artists and grassroots initiatives, amplifying the role of art in community-led change.

Babies Before Billionaires Campaign

Creative campaign collaboration with Morgan Payne.

The Babies Before Billionaires campaign is led by the People’s Unity Platform coalition. The Platform lays out concrete solutions rooted in Chicago’s progressive values—solutions that would improve life for everyone in our city. It isn’t a full list of everything our communities are fighting for, but a shared starting point for the changes we need.

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Taylor and Bring Chicago Home Collaboration

Taylor combined her caring approach to character design with strong collaborative skills to develop impactful promotional materials in collaboration with the leaders of the Bring Chicago Home campaign during a time of reflection and renewed strategy.

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Sharah and Fight Back Fight Forward Collaboration

Sharah led with a passion for empowering the community to tell their own stories outside the constraints of social media, digital censorship, and uncontrolled information sharing. Through collage, accessible and sustainable materials, popular education, and collaborative storytelling, Sharah supported the Fight Back Fight Forward campaign, enabling its members to take the fight against fascism into their own hands.

View and download the zine here.

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Yasmeen and Treatment Not Trauma Collaboration

Yasmeen, with a background in art therapy and workshop facilitation, combined her two passions to create a community-healing, conversation-starting toolkit for the Treatment Not Trauma campaign using zine-making and resource sharing. The campaign will use this toolkit to engage their base in the continued fight for expanded mental health services.

View and download the toolkit here.

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Meet the Fellows

As part of the fellowship, four selected fellows were paired with active campaigns, allowing them to contribute their creative talents to real-time organizing efforts while gaining hands-on experience and mentorship within the movement.

Morgan Payne (she/her)

Morgan Payne, born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, is a proud HBCU graduate who has built her career as a brand strategist & manager, operations consultant, and professional photographer/graphic designer. Morgan is an activist dedicated to equity and community empowerment. She is also the proud mother of her daughter, Myla, whose autism journey inspired her to co-found Bloom, a nonprofit social club that fosters connection between neurodivergent children and their neurotypical peers. Outside of her professional and advocacy work, Morgan has an impressive vinyl collection, a deep love for music, and enjoys building Legos for fun.

Sharah Hutson

Sharah/Georgia is from Atlanta, Georgia, and has been creating collages and zines for the past six years. Holding both the identities of being Black and Jewish influences Sharah/Georgia’s art-making process. Sharah/Georgia finds that building these collages gives them the room to re-imagine the world as it is and archive reflections/memories of what is currently happening in the world. Creating art while existing in an anti-Black world feels like an exercise of self-preservation. A majority of the materials that Sharah/Georgia uses to create the collages are found objects/recycled art materials.

Taylor A.W. Duffy (she/they)

Taylor A. W. Duffy (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago IL, and moved here back in 2016 from her hometown in northeast Ohio. She has worked on a variety of creative projects, from animated music videos and illustrating educational assets, to producing commercial videos. When not working on creative ventures, she loves learning and instructing about dog training and behavior, goofing off with her dogs and cats, and exploring around the city with her husband Chance.

Yasmeen Khayr (she/her)

Yasmeen Khayr (she/her) is a Lebanese, Muslim artist based in Chicago, IL. She loves the use of art as a release of creative energy and emotion and the particular ways in which art can facilitate emotional processing and expression. She is inspired by the power of communal art making and returning us to our innate creative selves. Yasmeen plays with linoleum block printing, embroidery, painting, and the interplay between different mediums. Yasmeen is also currently pursuing a degree in Art Therapy.