Weingart Homeless Center: Before you turn away put yourself in my place

To raise awareness for the Weingart Homeless Center, agency David & Goliath from Los Angeles took a non traditional approach that made people imagine themselves homeless if only for a moment. They photographed a dozen of the 70.000 people living on the streets of Los Angeles. They gave each of them a blank cardboard sign and had them write the same message: Before you turn away, put yourself in my place. Followed by the URL, weingart.org. Then they took those images, blew them up life-size, removed their faces and made them into photo-realistic cardboard cutouts. They placed the cutouts in upscale shopping centers in Bevery Hills and Santa Monica. Soon the homeless could not be ignored. This project not only raised awareness, but it ultimately raised funds according to David & Goliath.

Comments

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This is an amazing campaign. Congrats to David & Goliath for these terrific ideas! They spurred a fantastic brainstorm for an advocacy campaign I was working on with my colleagues.

Excellent! But being myself a person who thinks poverty issues are solved with work instead of begging for money, maybe those cardboards can be a way to push the government to redesign and boost the laboral enviroment, installing the “cardboard homeless” as crazy in the concerned offices.

And putting them in the street helping the people to push the government even further.