COMMON Hoops: Empowering Youths Through Design and Basketball
As part of Project M’s most recent summer program, in
partnership with COMMON, a creative
community for rapidly prototyping social ventures, I along with De, Nick, Philipp, Dawn and Isaac came together to start a sustainable social enterprise. The result is
COMMON Hoops, a program that empowers youths through design and basketball.
Why basketball? After exploring
Greensboro, Alabama, where Project M took place this year, we realized
that basketball to Hale County is like football to Texas—it’s
everywhere. And it would be an effective way to engage this community.
As
described on the COMMON Hoops website,
the goal of this program is to empower minority youths (ages 12–17) by creating
jobs, teaching new and transferable skills, and allowing them to enjoy the positive,
recreational activity that they love. Participants build and design basketball
backboards from salvaged and reclaimed materials, returning to their communities able to give back the valuable knowledge and experience they’ve gained.
My work on this project spawned from a
deep belief that design can have a positive social impact on our communities.
Through collaboration and the exploration of new ideas, society can harness
design as a powerful tool to create change. I am both honored and excited to be
able to take part in projects like COMMON Hoops that help make the world a
better place.
About the Author: Ethan is a designer and creative thinker. He is the author of Creative Grab Bag, published by HOW Books in 2009. He is also the student group director at AIGA Connecticut and a designer at Be Playful and co-developer of Prototype, both focused on designing the future of learning. In addition, he is a founding member of COMMON Hoops, created as part of Project M, was selected to be part of the AIGA BoNE [Best of New England] Show in 2011, and has received three Worldstudio AIGA Scholarships. You may recognize Ethan from the talk he gave with Charles Harrison at the AIGA National Design Conference. He currently lives in Connecticut and is a senior at the Hartford Art School.