Transcript

The Litter Letter Project | Rachel Hatley | TEDxSpringHillCollege

sharing a new idea is scary sharing an idea with people that is not fully formulated in your brain yet can be slightly terrifying but what if we put fear aside for a second and did go ahead and share that idea and we share it with friends and family and we share it with the UPS guy that delivered your parcels and then we shared it with our kids teachers and then what would happen if that idea eventually ended up in the hands of perfect strangers in cities and towns that we'd never visited before and maybe one day all the way across the world in a country had never even been before in 2012 I was living in a small town in the deep south country in in Louisiana about an hour north of New Orleans and it was idyllic I lived on 10 acres we had a pond there was grass there was trees there was bird singing there was not big malls it was the typical and what you would consider country life but it wasn't long we weren't living there that long before we realized that every two to three days I was picking up litter off the side of the highway this image right here is my highway at the time so there's something about this that was a complete contrast to why I was moving to the country so I hate litter I've always hated litter I'm annoyed by it I'm annoyed by people dropping it I don't understand why it's there at the time I was Coralville way through my MFA in graphic design and starting to sort of go online and figuring out what was I going to do with my MFA what was I going to spend my time doing and I came across this quote that said I think it was Lily Tomlin who said I always wondered why someone didn't do something about that and then I realized I was somebody well here I was as a signer in the middle of the country there's some litter on the side of the road why doesn't somebody do something about that maybe I should do something about that but what do you do so I've been a designer for 20 years up until this point and I always considered design as a tool for some kind of message we were always problem-solving and but when we solve the problems we use traditional methods to do that so we would design something on a billboard or a flyer which was litter incidentally and I thought I wanted to do something different so what if I took the litter that was on the side of my highway and used it to address the litter issue how would I do that I went to the local hardware store in town and thought about how I could collect the litter in some kind of material and then form it into some kind of shape or message again I was in the country chicken wire is everywhere so chicken wire it was gonna be it was cheap it was easy to get I didn't know what I was gonna do with it but I went back home and stared at this chicken wire for awhile and the seven bags of litter that I'd picked up off the highway I thought what the heck am I going to do so my son at the time was about three or four and the great thing about young children is they don't question your sanity so I I came out the house and I said to him would you call on the back porch with me for a second and how about we try and make something out of this litter and he's like yeah cool mom let's do it again so I knew I had one supporter so what you're seeing right here is the first prototypes that I started off with where do I start ABC right it seems so simple at the time they're a little crude they got better but what was different about this was I started sharing the ideas while I was working on them and that really sort of kind of made me progress into thinking about what do other people think about this issue and always been a big fan of that whole cliche that says think globally act locally lit is a huge issue its massive its global it's too big how am I going to fix that I can't fix that I can't think that way but maybe if I just focus on my little stretch of highway my little part of the world but in my little part of the world there were other people in that part of the world so so I took this idea to some of the local schools and said you know at the very least it could be this art project we can go in there and we can talk about litter and we can make some stuff what I didn't realize was that these are country kids right so I'm going in there to sort of give this instruction on how to build something these are country kids that make chicken coops on the weekend right so they know how to mold this stuff so they were they were teaching me this is how you do it and so on and this tool works better and so on like this so but what had happened in the actually process of building these were the conversations about the litter what did we feel about it how do we care do we care how does it how does it end up on the side of the road and so on the conversations were going while we was making stuff so I got to this point where I was making these letters and these words kept coming into the conversations all the time care thing respect pride change why all these things that people felt about the issue and here I was saying well this has cut me a tool that you can use to address that issue what about if we make some of these words that you are thinking about so what you're seeing right here are the two-foot tall letters that we initially built and actually looks a little bit more later like letter form so not quite so cringing looking at these so I then thought that well if I'm just making these letters and going into schools and they're 2 foot tall and I'm putting them on the side of a high way well you drive down the highway at 55 miles an hour you're not gonna see these things right so I'm gonna have to think a little bit bigger at the time I had immersed myself in my community I got involved in some local organizations there were really very grassroots type of organizations that were trying to do something about the litter trying to get people engaged and they were tired and they'd run out of ideas and I went there and I said hey how about you try this this might be an idea and they said well that's all very well and good but how am I going to do that we have no money I had the opportunity through through going to some recycling lunch in New Orleans and I met the people that keep Louisiana beautiful and they invited me to come and share this idea again scary right standing there with a two-foot tall letter saying hey how about you think about this as a project so I did that I can't think out to pitch it in about seven minutes or something like that was like speed dating almost so I did that and thought well that's probably the end of it you know they're not going to put money into this thing right but they did they came up to me at the end of the conference and they said you know we've got some money we can share with we can share that with you and but you have to do it through an organization and you have to write a grant and so on and I don't know if anybody here has written the grant but they asked you a bunch of questions on that grant that I didn't know the answers to like how much is it going to cost where are they going to go who are the people that you're going to work with I don't know the answers to any of those things so this was an idea I'd got the money and but I still didn't know the answers to all these questions but guess what the community did so I I gave I gave my time and energy into putting the idea into their hands and what happened was sort of like an organic process they there was somebody on the board that said we can we can do welding there was someone on the board that says we have the landfill we can do the space there was the mayor on the board that says we can put it up and the idea was starting to become this real thing so what you're seeing right here is the prison system I know sounds a bit absurd but our prison system welded the letters into a six-foot-tall framing for us so still using the chicken wire is the basic prototype that I said I've already created about six months prior so the system was just the same but the framing allowed it to sort of stand and be sturdy what you're seeing right here again is the six foot the first word of pride pride was the word that came up all the time in every conversation we had and this was in Louisiana in April and I don't know if you've been to Louisiana in April but it's hot it's disgusting Lee Hart I was sat it I was stood in a landfill we were dealing with a lot of litter in a building that had no air-conditioning it didn't smell very good it didn't feel very good and I was super excited about it and I was like this is a six-foot-tall letter R I am fired up people were saying are you sure this is a good thing to do what's gonna happen when these things get out of there and I said you know what it's okay say it'll be fine he'll be fine you know so there was this kind of I was helping them they were helping me we were we were questioning it even while we'd already had it approved so it was still being developed along the way so almost a year to the day since I had this crazy idea in my head these went out on public view in the town of Franklinton in Louisiana and Washington Parish and they caused a stir some people love this thing some people didn't like it so much I had lawyers they came up to me and said I cannot believe you've taken the litter off the side of the road and you've placed it there across my lawyer's office I don't want to see that and I say guess what neither do I so it basically what happened was it was a series of conversations that allowed this project to instill own ship in the project so everyone that had placed at there by this point we had something like I don't know forty fifty people had put their hands on this and I always believe when you put your hands on a project you own it it belongs to you we went ahead and fulfilled the grant and we made several other words in there in the in the parish and I thought that was the end of it I went to Vermont I finished my MFA I graduated I took the six book question mark to Vermont so I took the litter from Louisiana on a little vacation to Vermont that is that sit in the box and on the way back down I had posted the all the things that we've done in Washington Parish and Keep America Beautiful I'd seen it on social media and they contact me and they said this is kind of intriguing can we can we talk about this and I said of course I said actually I'm in a u-haul and I've got a six-foot question mark and how about a drop in your offices in Connecticut and show you so this picture in the in the middle is my husband lifting the six-foot question mark and keep America's beautiful office they then presented the idea of maybe we can we maybe we can showcase this idea on on Keep America Beautiful website are you okay with that I said absolutely Sharon Sharon two days later I was still on the way back down from Vermont and somebody from Tennessee called me and said I'm really interested I saw this on Keep America Beautiful site and again I said hey guess what I can drive through Tennessee so this picture right here is me standing in a winn-dixie parking lot in the middle of Tennessee with a six-foot question mark talking to a perfect stranger yay don't we all do that every day so she said I'm so intrigued with this idea I love it is there any way I can do it can I can I do my version of it and I said not only can you do your version of it I'm gonna help you do this thing I don't know how but we're gonna we're going to get this done so three months after our conversation they had little letters in Pigeon Forge Tennessee and it's kind of snowballed from there so because it's been on social media and people have seen the idea they have they've used it for several different purposes so it's been used for small events with small groups of people with kids that age for up through to their grandparents and then it's used for much larger events for like 600 people and so on so it's across the board some people have used it for literal wareness some people have used these as vessels to contain recycling materials so it's been used it's the same project but it's been it's been used differently in every in every city so as of right now on I'm standing here right now I have little letters in over 30 cities in the United States across six states and they're all little different they all are a true reflection of the collaboration that is involved in their city in their town they met they we are profoundly connected together because it's the same idea I had on my back porch with my four-year-old but again they've been used for different purposes and they belong to them this is a gift I gifted this to them and this is what they created so in terms of outcomes what does this all mean well I know that in certain places it has reduced the litter I know that in many places they have been able to identify the way the issues are with the litter so if there's certain fast-food restaurants in a certain location when they're actually on view and the in the letters you can see so you can sort of identify but Keep America Beautiful comes back to me and says sorry they came back to me and they the mission that they have that says people on places are profoundly interconnected you know change happens change is not an event it's a process collaboration is the key so there's if I can leave you with anything today it's to say that you know it's a gift if you have these ideas if you're sitting here and there's an idea there's a little tiny seed of an idea in your mind go share it with somebody share it with 20 people share it with 30 people maybe 15 if those 30 people will be on your side and they'll help you make it happen thank you [Applause] you