The US Forest Service approached us with a problem: Black and Hispanic families don’t feel welcome or represented in our public parks and forests.
So we responded with a solution: a campaign that channeled an important family activity—story time—and used it to give families a tangible reason to visit their forests.
We named the platform concept “Make The Forest Part of Your Story.”
Rather than center our own perspectives, we hired amazingly talented authors and artists from these communities to help us dream up modern day forest tales that would culturally resonate with our audience for our broadcast spots and amplified their voices instead of our own. Joe Cepeda helped us to create “Our Colores/Nuestros Colores” and Shabazz Larkin helped us create “Am I A Tree?”
As our ECD put it, it’s “a campaign that doesn’t just speak to Black and Hispanic families, it belongs to them. Just like our parks and forests.”
We didn’t stop there. We took it a step further and brought these stories and two more into the real world a mobile-first digital storybook web app to allow families to customize and create their own stories using family photos from their visits to parks and forests. It’s a fun, free, and creative way to create a shareable keepsake and inspire memories for a lifetime. And it channels kids’ love of smartphones into a tool for their imagination in nature.
Credits:
ECD - Lixaida Lorenzo
AD - Peter Watson
Senior Producer - Brandon Kusher
Production - Backyard Productions
Director - Max Gutierrez
Finishing - Zero VFX
Mix - SHINDIG Music + Sound