Positive Impact Resources

Looking for additional ways to design for good? This list of organizations and programs is a great place to start.

Seeking an organization that pairs designers with nonprofits or provides guidelines on running a nonprofit project in your area? See our act and advocate list.

Are you a student or professional seeking ideas for internships, mentorships, professional development opportunities or graduate programs in the social impact realm? Check out our learn and grow list.

Do you have a socially impactful design project that would benefit from a grant? Or perhaps another form of support could help you turn your great idea into reality? Review our fund and support list.

Act & Advocate

All for Good

All for Good makes it simple to find ways to do good by helping people connect with service activities in their communities. The site brings together service opportunities from local and national organizations to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and interests

Association for Community Design (ACD)

Association for Community Design (ACD), a a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is a network of individuals, organizations, and institutions committed to increasing the capacity of planning and design professions to better serve communities. ACD serves and supports practitioners, educators, and organizations engaged in community-based design and planning.

Catchafire

Catchafire is an online pro bono talent network that matches professionals who want to give their skills with purpose-driven nonprofits and social enterprises that need their help to build capacity. Matches are made based on a variety of characteristics including skills, cause interests, and time availability.

Center for Urban Pedagogy

Center for Urban Pedagogy is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to improve meaningful civic engagement. CUP collaborates with designers, educators, advocates, students, and communities to make educational tools that demystify complex policy and planning issues.

CreateAthon

CreateAthon is a national organization that provides guidelines for marketing, advertising and public relations firms to participate and run their own 24-hour, work-around-the-clock creative blitz, during which nonprofit marketing services are provided on a pro bono basis.

Design for America

Design for America teaches human centered design to young adults and collaborating community partners and implements innovative solutions based on insights into human needs, rapid prototyping, user-testing, and interdisciplinary team work. Design for America currently addresses national challenges in education, health, and environment and is constantly seeking mentors and students to participate.

Design Trust for Public Space

Design Trust for Public Space is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the future of public space in New York City. Its projects bring together city agencies, community groups and private sector experts to make a lasting impact–through design–on how New Yorkers live, work and play.

Design that Matters (DtM)

Design that Matters (DtM) is a 501c3 nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly. DtM has built a collaborative design process through which hundreds of volunteers in academia and industry donate their skills and expertise to the creation of breakthrough products for communities in need.

EPIC | Engaging Philanthropy, Inspiring Creatives

EPIC | Engaging Philanthropy, Inspiring Creatives is a Chicago-based organization that hosts a number of eight-week creative rallies each year, pairing hand-picked volunteers from the advertising and design industries with nonprofit clients dedicated to education, children and families. During the rally, teams create programs and materials—on a strictly pro bono basis—that their nonprofit client will use to positively impact the lives of those they serve.

Firebelly Foundation

Firebelly Foundation, in Chicago, supports Reason to Give, a nonprofit program, that shares the stories of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood and connects people who care with people who need a hand.

Good Thinking

Good Thinking is an Atlanta-based volunteer creative service organization that provides communication tools to qualified Not for Profit 501c3 organizations (NPOs) that provide health, education and/or welfare services to Greater Atlanta families. Good Thinking draws volunteers from every creative discipline to work in teams on efficient schedules within a defined scope. The organization has the capacity to provide recipient NPOs any creative service tool that fulfills the approved scope, budget an schedule. Volunteers work with talented peers under the direction of the city’s best creative leaders.

!mpact Sessions Archive

!mpact sessions archive contains free 30-minute webinars that explore how design-driven ideas for social good are launched. Presented by Impact! Design for Social Change, the School of Visual Arts and Design Ignites Change in 2013–2014.

INDEX

INDEX: is a Danish-based, non-profit organization that works globally to promote and apply both design and design processes that have the capacity to improve the lives of people worldwide through a biennial competition focused on design to improve life, education, labs, large-scale public events and communication.

Girls Garage

Girls Garage is a nonprofit design and building program and dedicated workspace for girls ages 9-18. Through classes in carpentry, welding, architecture, and activist art, we support and equip a community of fearless girls who are building the world they want to see. Established 2013.

Taproot Foundation

Taproot Foundation is a nonprofit organization in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., that matches pro bono business talent with nonprofit organizations working to improve society that could otherwise not access the marketing, design, technology, management or strategic planning resources they need to succeed.

UX for Good

UX for Good is a design competition that brings together top user experience and visual designers to tackle vexing social challenges with the help of executives from leading non-profit organizations addressing those challenges.

Worldstudio Foundation

Worldstudio Foundation is a nonprofit devoted exclusively to encouraging social responsibility in the design and arts professions and helping the next generation of artist, architects and designers realize their dreams while being pro-actively involved in their communities, through an array of initiatives. Worldstudio Foundation offers scholarships and mentoring programs in the fine and applied arts.

Learn & Grow

Camp Firebelly

Camp Firebelly is a summer design program that selects bright, talented students from across the country to live in the Firebelly Design studio in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois for 10 days. While in residence, 10 student campers live and work with Firebelly to craft a strategic design solution for a non-profit client, from initial research to final implementation.

Creative States

Creative States is an online media platform exploring bold new creativity in the public realm. Its mission is to revive healthy civic dialogue and citizen ingenuity in politics, public sector, and civic space.

Design for Social Innovation

Design for Social Innovation, an MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), applies the methodology of design to the creation of new models, products and services that address the complex social and environmental challenges facing businesses, governments and society. Students work at the intersection of design, social innovation and enterprise, using design as a tool for social and environmental impact.

Design Ignites Change

Design Ignites Change is a national initiative of Worldstudio, that engages high school and college students in multidisciplinary design and architecture projects that address pressing social issues. Participants are encouraged to apply unleashed creativity and executable actions to problems that exist in their own communities.

D-Lab

D-Lab is a program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that fosters the development of appropriate technologies and sustainable solutions within the framework of international development. D-Lab’s mission is to improve the quality of life of low-income households through the creation and implementation of low cost technologies.

Designmatters

Designmatters is a program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena that focuses on the intersection of art and design and social change and aims to help students develop the skills to translate meaningful ideas into actionable solutions.

DESIS

DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability ) is a worldwide network of design labs, based in design-oriented schools universities, involved in promoting sustainable change. In the U.S., labs include Designmatters at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, Parsons DESIS Lab in NEW York, NY, Carnegie Mellon DESIS Lab in Pittsburgh, PA, and DESIS Lab SCAD in Savannah, GA.

Foresight Immersion

Foresight Immersion is the nation's leading hands-on sustainable civic innovation program based in Chicago, IL. Developed over ten years, Immersion is a seven-week summer program that provides emerging leaders with the guiding methodologies, foundational knowledge, project experience, skills and network to create sustainable impact in an evolving landscape. Participants from all majors and professional backgrounds work in interdisciplinary teams to develop insight, identify barriers, and innovate solutions to real world problems across the business, government, and nonprofit sectors.

Project M

Project M is an annual intensive summer program in Greensboro, AL, for young creative people inspired to contribute to the greater good, and looking for a platform to collaborate and generate ideas and projects bigger than themselves. The program encourages and provides techniques for thinking in a non-linear way in order to generate new ideas and design directions in a way that brings about true innovation and creative exploration.

Public Interest Design Institutes®

Public Interest Design Institutes® provide training to design professionals with in-depth study over two days on methods of how design can address the critical issues faced by communities. Training in public interest design is a way of enhancing an existing practice and learning skills to become pro-actively engaged in community-based design through fee-based projects.

Fund & Support

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. On Kickstarter, project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work, but only if a project reaches its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands.

Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The Foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.

The National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts recognizes design's ever-present role by funding activities across the design disciplines that encourage, preserve, and disseminate the best in American and global design and its impact on communities.

The Public Access Design Fellowship

The Public Access Design Fellowship provided by Center for Urban Pedagogy, allows New York City-based artists and designers to apply their design skills to contribute to social change. Fellows collaborate with CUP and a community organization to create multimedia projects that use design to make complex urban issues accessible to the New Yorkers most affected by them.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s NYC Cultural Innovation Fund

The Rockefeller Foundation’s NYC Cultural Innovation Fund supports creativity and the arts, with an emphasis on innovation. The Foundation awards two-year grants for groundbreaking creative work that enriches the city’s cultural life and strengthens the role that the arts will play in the future of New York.

This list of resources was compiled and edited with help from Zofia Klajs, graphic designer, artist, and printmaker based in Warsaw, Poland. Klajs is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Fulbright Visiting Researcher and Kosciuszko Foundation short term Scholar at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City (2014, 2016).