For my part of the project, I designed the posters. The posters were a idea we came up with as a way to let people know about the campaign and spread the word. I knew that the posters would need to catch, as well as hold, people’s attention. For the posters, my goal was not to give people information, but to direct them to it. I only wanted to make people interested enough to bring them to the website via the QR code that I would put on the posters. For these reasons, I decided to make the posters rather simple and plain, along with very little text. I wanted to make three to four posters using photoshop. I ended up making three simple posters that were very different from each other. 

I spent a lot of time planning out exactly which photos to use, the colors in each, the placement of the words, and the font. I ended up using the same font for each poster, connecting them in some way. I made each one very simple, using only one photo, and very little text. The hardest part was probably putting on the text. This is because I had to decide how big I wanted it to be, and where to put/fit it on the poster. The other challenge was getting the coloring how I wanted it on the robot poster. I wanted the posters to each be minimalistic, so I looked up a photoshop minimal poster tutorial. I followed this for the poster, but it was still challenging. 

Overall, I am happy with how the posters turned out to be.  To make them effective and to put them in action, I hung them up in different places around the school. Because each one had a QR code leading to our website, I wanted to hang them up in places where people go the most often. That way more people will see the poster, and are more likely to scan it. I put them in the stairwell, as well as on some of the most popular walls, and most used doors. I tried to put about one of each poster design on each floor. While hanging them up, I had a few teachers comment on them and tell me that it catches their eye, and some even asked me more about the project and campaign. Mr. Lehman also retweeted one of the posters on twitter, which helped to get the word out. These were some of the ways that I knew the posters were effective. 

My group’s campaign topic is  College Dropout rates in Philadelphia and what we planed to do was first raise awareness that this is a growing problem in Philadelphia, while also pointing out different solutions to fix it. So Devante, Joshua, Aazimah and I decided that we were going to create a poster, flyers, a PSA and a twitter page to present this problem to our target audience. Our target audience was college students in Philadelphia so we would host most of are campaigning downtown near Penn and Drexel Campuses.

My roles in this project were to create the twitter page, find places for us to post and hand out our flyers and work on the group PSA component. Each of these component to me had their own advantages and disadvantages, such as how I may have found a place where college students do come past but when we went to that location during lunch hours their was no one to hang out the flyers too. But overall I think I made some good progress on my components of the project such as networking on twitter. My groups’ account is now sending our message out to 70+ followers which considering that it has only been active for a week that is a rapid approval rating. This also shows some success to the flyers and posters made by other group members because the username to the twitter page is posted on each component.

Running a champaign is an emotional roller coster rode by multiple people. My group was given Philadelphia Housing Infrastructure. The first step we took was acknowledging the problem. The group who first presented this obstacle proposed that there were two many abandon houses in Philadelphia, around 40,500 estimated. We decided we could take this a step further then that. Philadelphia has about 4,000 homeless people. These numbers, to us, made no sense. We noticed we had an abundance of vacant houses and thousands of people who were in need of homes, so we put the two together. We figured Philadelphia could simply solve our abandoned house problem by filling them with people who need homes, sounded so easy.   

Well, the first thing we discussed was how we were just going to go about giving random people homes. We know that many people struggle with difficulties and are actually trying to advance in life. However, we are also aware of people who would take advantage of this initiative, so we decided to create a binding contract. People would be assigned homes which are vacant and would be expected to care for them to the best of their ability. That means picking up trash around it and also cleaning it out on their own. This would not only give homeless people motivation to have something they owned but also slowly decrease the amount of liter in Philadelphia. Once they showed care for a home over a certain time period we planned on the government helping to fund construction of the homes. That was until we sent a letter to the mayors office and got no response.         

This is when we knew what we wanted from the general public. The point of our champaign was to try to get people to donate funds and materials to our initiative. We created posters which we posted around the center city area which lead people back to our website. The point of the posters were to grab people’s attention and promote our champaign at the same time. We also set up a QR code so viewers with smart phones could be lead directly to our website and social networking sites. So our champaign consist of 6 components: 

-Letter to the Mayor’s office 

-PSA 

-Posters 

-Website 

-QR code 

-Twitter  

For a group of 17 year olds I think we did pretty well trying to publicly push an initiative we built from the ground up. However, our champaign was not a cake walk. We had many grand ideas which we completely dropped when it was time to implicate them. For instance, we wanted to promote our champaign through a physical sculpture. This sculpture consisted of four nice bird houses and one broken down bird house. We were planing on writing “even birds wouldn't live here” on the sculpture and placing a simple QR code to our website. This,we thought, would grab people’s attention because it was odd and mysterious. However, our designated birdhouse hunter Tsion, found it very hard to find bird houses for sale in the city. She went to multiple art stores and was left empty handed. We could have ordered them off line, but it was unknown when we would receive them, so we trashed the idea. Ideas which we could not implicate in real life left us with more lessons learned rather then disappointment. When everything was said and done, we realized ideas blossomed when they were thought of outside of the box but we had to watch our physical limitations. Running a champaign is an emotional roller coster rode by multiple people, one of which my group and I rode happily, successfully, and learned many lessons from.

      My group’s project was on Teen Pregnancy for this project we needed to start a campaign. However we had to do so on a budget of $0 and also set it into action. The people in my group were Jeff, Michael, Helen, and Keyaira. Together we came up with plans and ideas on how to get the word out about teen pregnancy.

        I was the person who decided that we should do posters. While it was my idea we all chipped in and put up plans. For one of the posters it was my idea to use a baby doll rather then a real baby. I helped write out the words on one of our posters. It doesn’t seem as though I did a lot, but as a group we did so much more. There were some things that I came up with that we didn’t need. Like where to place the posters to get the best reaction. I suggested that we put some in the bathrooms for some kind of reaction. I’m not sure if that plan fell through if it was just decided to not be done. While working on this project Helen and Keyaira did an amazing job on posting the posters up everywhere.

       The only difficulty would have been communication. It was hard to stay in touch outside of class. I was very out of the loop at times and felt that even though it seemed ok I should have tried harder. I am proud of the results our project got even if they weren’t too serious. One of the reasons that it wasn’t taken too seriously could be the website we were using. We found it amusing, but it could have caused a loss of urgency that we wanted. The posters themselves could have done it. Over all, however, the project came out great.     

The group I worked with for the the duration of this project focused on the epidemic of HIV/AIDS throughout Philadelphia. Raeven, Taylor, Jailsa, and I brainstormed many ideas to help broadcast this problem to those in our school, and those throughout the city. We immediately began breaking down the project in to portions where think we would be most productive. Raeven created a google doc form where people could anonymously answer questions on HIV/AIDs related inquiries, Taylor created the script for our video and acted in it, Jalisa edited said video, and I was charged with social networking and creating an ad. 

Since we save desserts for last, I’ll list a couple challenges that arrived during the creation of this project. One challenge was designing an ad that would quickly grasp the eye of a passerby, while still delivering a powerful message. Many different advertisements line the walls of SLA, telling all who read of upcoming events. I had to make sure that our ad could compete amongst the sea of ads. I decided to incorporate the most famous African-American AIDS awareness activist Magic Johnson on a poster, along with some clover statistics. Instead of posting them around the school, we will be handing them out. This insures that people must at least look at them firsthand, before doing whatever they please with them. 

Another challenge was gaining followers on Twitter. We felt twitter would be the best social network to set up on because of it’s popular promotion reputation. YOu can get a word out quickly, and follow other pages that support the same cause as you. What started off as a fun idea, turned sour quickly. We couldn’t manage to get followers outside of our group mates! We knew our page wouldn’t progress within our own circle, so we looked to other groups who created twitters for their problem. Once we “followed” them, promotions and constant tweeting got me to a staggering 12 followers. Yes, this is a challenge that we are still trying to solve. 

On the other hand, a success we managed to pull off was a smooth video. Our video consisted of an angel and a devil, whom represented good judgement and bad judgement. Taylor approached us with a thorough script which clearly depicted each person’s role, and of course what they were saying. We were even able to use the nurse’s office to help Jalisa complete her role as a nurse preparing an AIDS test. I believe this video will grab the viewer’s attention of the presence of HIV/AIDS, and also the importance of getting tested/treated for it as quickly as possible. 

All in all, this project was fairly simple, as long as you’re organized. We broke down roles from the beginning, which gave all of us the chance to think about how we could construct our individual parts. With more time came more ways to perfect our product, and also add more components to help broadcast what we needed to say to the public. Our objective was to inform others of the dire epidemic of HIV/AIDS, which we think we accomplished. 

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

   This website gives you a over view of the rates of cost in colleges over the years. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/business/economy/09leonhardt.html?_r=1&

  This site talks about how the colleges are failing with their graduation rates. It mainly talks about the university of Massachusetts and how it’s rates have fallen over the years. 

Interview with Kerina Hershfiled 

 In the interview we tried to talk about collage graduation rates and found out that they are very hard to calculate. They only just recently found out how to do that and only just recently put them up. 

http://www.supportingevidence.com/Education/College_Grad_Rates.html

 This cite has a graph showing the changing rate from 1940 to 2008. This is a useful visual source. 

http://middleclasspoliticaleconomist.blogspot.com/2012/04/america-shows-no-increase-in-college.html

  This source tells about how over time the graduation rates haven’t increased. IT explains how and why this might be. 

1. 

Lane, Roger (1999). Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Ohio State University Press

This book depicts various forms of crimes in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, predominately murder. Roger Lane told the story of violence in philadelphia, backed by thorough comparisons of national statistics. Lane says how the Nineteenth-century murders were significantly lower than those of modern times. Lane uses final records of deceased individuals, sometimes as small as the regards from a state agent, to help reflect the lives they lived before their deaths. This source is kind of reliable due to her direct contact with people who were aware of how the deaths occurred or even family members. This source is slightly unreliable because some people she contacted didn’t know the people from a can of paint. Overall I think this source is good because she cited gun violence as one of the main causes of death besides natural, which is an essential detail in our project. 

2. 

Cook, Philip J., Jens Ludwig (2000). "Chapter 2". Gun Violence: The Real Costs. Oxford University Press

This book outlines the cost Gun Violence costs America annually, while also giving statistics of murder rates. Cook goes in to detail on how much it actually costs to clean and properly treat a gunshot wound, and how it is not only hurting our country’s people, but the economy as well. Cook also says that Philadelphia's percentage of gun violence has risen more than 20% since 1973, proving that Philadelphia’s gun violence is spiraling at a positive rate, but is a negative impact on the city. This source is reliable because he cites direct sources and city officials. He also cites the U.S Census and cross checks different crimes that are committed in Philly to see how many are gun related. 

3. 

Murphy , Ray. "Gun Violence in Philadelphia." Ray Murph'ys Blog. N.p., 10 010 2007. Web. Web. 14 Feb. 2013. <http://youngphillypolitics.com/gun_violence_philadelphia>.

In this blog, author Ray Murphy gives his insight on the continuos murders that were popping up throughout Philadelphia. He comments on how the city might be better overall without guns, and what he thinks could be the main cause of all these murders. He gives quantitative data by stating the amount of gun related murders that were committed that far into 2007 (300), which was not really backed by a source. This source is both reliable, and unreliable. It is reliable because he has some factual data included, but also unreliable because he features a lot of opinionated views. 

4. 

Bohn, Kevin. "Philadelphia: Teen 'afraid every da'y as gun violence soars." CNN [Philadelphia] n.d., n. pag. Print. <http://articles.cnn.com/2007-05-16/us/philly.homicides_1_zip-gun-violence-violent-crime?_s=PM:US>.

This source is an interview of an average Philadelphian teen on gun violence, conducted by CNN. Isaac Diaz is asked numerous questions about gun violence and how he copes with it. CNN also cites that the new record for gun-related murders in a year is 406, which topped the 400 set in 1990. I would count this source as reliable because it comes from CNN. CNN is a nationally credited news broadcasting company, so I assume they have a group of fact checkers backing the work. I also count this source as reliable because the interview is direct, no second hand relays or anything that can taint the words from Diaz’s mouth. 

5. 

Huttonlock, Frank. Interview by Nuri Bracey. Gun Violence in Philadelphia 14 February 2013. February . Print.

This last source was an interview conducted by myself. The interviewee was Frank Huttonlock, a Gun Range Safety Officer located in Philadelphia. The interview was based on three questions; "What do you think is the main cause of gun violence?",

"Which age group commits the most gun related crimes?", and "How can you work to control gun violence?" A response I got was “Media is the main cause of gun violence to me. All these teens see is how they’re favorite artist is waving a gun to get what he wants, and they try to mimic that.” The classic response, and a liable one at that. I think this source is reliable and unreliable at the same time. It is reliable because yet again, it is straight from interviewer to interviewee. It’s unreliable because his answers aren’t factual, but opinionated.