Mental Media Challenge

MFA in Emergent Media | Spring 2017 semester | Leadership in an Age of Transformation
Assignment: Create a grand challenge addressing a "wicked problem", as a group project.

Myself and three other students (a unique blend of undergrad and grad students) created the Mental Media Challenge. This was a comprehensive and highly collaborative project that spanned four months. As you can see in our final presentation deck, the project was multi-faceted and used many different forms of media to address a serious issue. My primary roles included project managing, writing web and social media content, and establishing partner connections (Vermont Department of Health and others).

"The overall goal of the Mental Media Challenge was to combat the negative stigmatizes surrounding how mental health and mental illness are portrayed in our media. To do this we created a competition where we asked Champlain College students to take an existing piece of media that currently has a negative message of mental health and remix it to send a positive message. We raised awareness of the competition throughout the Champlain College community and in the local Burlington community. We had plans for crowd-sourcing the judging of our submissions and for sharing those submissions in such a way to raise money for charity. We created high quality content to concisely promote and convey our message. Despite our numerous marketing efforts, we did not receive any submissions, but being media creators ourselves we created example submissions to show the messages we are trying to send. The following is an overview of everything that we did over the course of the semester. We reflected on this experience and our two major takeaways are that we didn’t scope down far enough and that the launch of the competition was not timed well for our target market of Champlain students."