#LearningToHeal
A few days ago, I came across the Better Learning Programme, an initiative of the Norwegian Refugee Council that aims to help teachers support children who are suffering from stress and trauma as a result of war and displacement. Psychosocial support is a vital aspect of the assistance humanitarian organisations provide to affected populations, and no one needs it more desperately than children. The burden they carry can sometimes seem invisible but it can follow them long into adulthood and profoundly affect them for life.
With the programme active for 12 years, I found that there hadn’t been an extensive and in-depth campaign that showcased the excellent work being done by the NRC. I decided that it would be an interesting exercise to come up with a few eye-catching visuals that would attract the interest of the casual internet dweller and hopefully raise awareness of the needs of children in conflict areas, as well as the progress made towards helping them.
About a year ago, when I was developing the concept of the #SheInnovates campaign of the WFP Innovation Accelerator, I understood that at the essence of any successful advocacy and outreach strategy is a very simple idea. Something that would stick with any member of the general public that perhaps doesn’t understand the intricacies of the work but could potentially care deeply about the issue. Back with #SheInnovates, the message was “When she innovates, we all benefit.“ So for this new concept, I needed a similar kind of sentiment. To me, as someone just discovering the work of the NRC in this field, what stuck out was that post-conflict (or even amidst conflict), children had two paths ahead of them - one of struggle and another of opportunity.
I decided to put my Midjourney and Canva skills to the test, generating an image of a child in both comfortable and precarious situations to showcase the contrast of the two directions their lives could take. To make the message even clearer, I added slogans that caught the eye. I even went an extra step to partially hide some of the text behind the subjects to improve the production quality a bit - in my opinion, small things like this make a big difference and the whole material feels more poished.
I played around quite a bit on Midjourney, trying to find a good combination of images that would show children of various ages and backgrounds, as well as what a good future could look like for them. It was important to me to also show their positive outcomes in a way that showed their culture and home countries. I didn’t want to make all the safe spaces Euro-centric as to imply that this is the only road to happiness and fulfilment. AI knowledge can still be very biased in how it portrays genders, races, and cultural backgrounds, so it was important to me to counteract that with my own sensibilities.
All in all, I had a lot of fun with this project. My last post was focused on the reasons we should think twice about AI art and imagery in our materials, but clearly we can use artificially generated images to boost our creativity and make impactful campaigns. I think under certain circumstances, the artificial aspect does, in fact, enhance the material as it does not pretend to be genuine and real - rather, it embraces the fantasy and shows us what the future looks like if we do - or don’t - take action.
