Make a Mark (letsmakeamark.org) puts on 12-hour hackathons that pair “makers” (designers, developers, writers, photographers, etc) with worthy local humanitarian causes.
I started the San Francisco chapter because I wanted to provide a venue for impact-driven designers to volunteer their valuable skillsets.
It clicked immediately! Nonprofits lack the resources to pay for high quality design work (but desperately need it) and Bay Area tech-workers often lack a sense of fulfillment in their day jobs. We craft teams that match the right volunteer skillset with an impactful design project for the nonprofit. The end result is magic!
We held our first SF Make a Mark event on October 20, 2018. The event included 50 makers and benefitted 14 Bay Area non-profits. Read the full event recap
In the build up to own main annual event, we organized a 2-hour “mini design marathon” called Make for Good on June 26, 2019 as part of SF Design Week. We had 40 attendees who worked on 9 different projects for nonprofits. The nonprofit staff worked with their teams to define and solve the problem using human centered design thinking principles. In the end, they left with a fresh perspective and tangible next steps to solving their biggest challenges.
Our second Make a Mark in 2019 was hosted by Segment.
Not Make a Mark, but related to planning design community gatherings…
SF Design Week: Eyes on the Enterprise Panel 2018
I organized and moderated a panel on enterprise design for San Francisco Design Week at the AppDirect office. The goal was to gain visibly in design community for AppDirect to help with recruiting and to give our design team a platform to share our extensive collective experience and knowledge within the space of designing for enterprise technology companies.
I recruited visual design leaders from HelloSign, Chartio, and Atlassian (my manager, Derick Carss was also a panelist). The companies range in size, but all are designing for an enterprise tech product. I curated the panel questions and prepared the panelists. The event had 60+ engaged attendees and went off without a hitch!
