The Power of Design for Social Change

My name is John Ra, and I am the Senior Director of Creative Services at Partners In Health. I’ve been working here for over seven years now and started off as a graphic designer. I now manage a team within the marketing and communications department, overseeing the photo and video team, graphic design team, and now the web team as well. I am responsible for the visual side of branding and content, mainly for our external audience.

I wasn’t actually looking to work at Partners In Health or specifically with non-profits or a global health organisation. I majored in advertising to fuse my interest in business and arts together, which happened to be a nice medium where I can exercise a lot of creativity towards human behaviours.
I also had a desire to be an entrepreneur, which would have been a very different path, but eventually, were I to be successful in either path, I wanted to spend my time helping others, doing good for the world, and being a mentor so I could help others to do the same. By a fortunate referral to an open position at Partners In Health, I’ve skipped a lot of those steps.

No, it was definitely not my vision. It’s a vision that was shared by my colleagues, and I fully resonate with it because I feel both logically and intuitively that it is the right thing to do. Even from the procedure perspective, it made more sense for local communications teams to be hired because our colleagues would integrate into the global communities we’re trying to help. We had to do a lot of advocacy around expanding our communication team in all 11 of our care delivery sites, and we’re definitely starting to see that vision actualise.

Now, a lot of our team’s efforts are trying to ensure our colleagues are onboarded properly so that our storytelling and visuals in each country are cohesive with the brand. We avoid the term headquarters for our U.S. office; instead, we call ourselves the coordination site. We’ve begun to provide the base of what the visual guideline could be or what the ethical content-gathering guideline can be. Once our global colleagues are caught up, we hope they will contribute to our new guidelines and creative systems.

My team excels at organising information. So, we focus on the efficient delivery of information while at the same time trying to do it in the most innovative, creative, and ethical way possible. We have developed our ethical content-gathering process, and we have various creative techniques to package the information. For our external audience to have a pleasant yet engaging user experience, I think this is the main way we will stand out. For Partners In Health, our mission of “striving to make health care a human right for all people” alongside how we approach our work helps us stand out compared to other NGOs.

Yes, but I agree with the Haitian phrase “Men anpil, chay pa lou”, which means many hands make the load lighter. We definitely get into an annual challenge of ambitious projects, and it does wear us down, but we always find a way to make it work. Our department’s goal is to provide more resources for our care delivery sites which in turn will care for more people and save more lives. And that thought fuels my work.

I really like working with other creatives, but I consider everybody to be creative, really. Even if they don’t see themselves on the creative team, I notice everyone has great ideas. And that’s why I enjoy focusing on how to actualise good ideas. Because everyone is passionate and considerate at the same time, collaboration is enjoyable, even if it’s a challenge. It’s a great feeling to achieve something great collectively.

For me to experience one of our care delivery sites, especially my trip to Sierra Leone, was incredible. To be able to finally meet the colleagues that I’ve been emailing and messaging from time to time and to see the communities that work in our hospitals and facilities and the incredible work that they do in person had a huge impact on me. I was holding the camera for that trip and had the privilege to follow the late Dr. Paul Farmer as he was going through a hospital. His interactions with everybody around him, from staff members to patients - was truly inspirational. So I would say that’s one of my favorite projects or at least moments in Partners In Health because I’ve always heard about his level of compassion, his incredible ability to retain details about everybody that he has met, and the deep care that he provides for every single patient he interacts with. I’ve never seen anything like that, and it definitely had a big impact on how I approach the work and my interaction with others.

Clarity of information and how information is shared with the receiver. It’s like the telephone game. You should share the message very clearly in a way that the receiver can accept it; otherwise, it could easily transfer into something completely different depending on how people interpret it. There are also phrases like a picture is worth a thousand words or it didn’t happen! So, it really helps to validate the information through imagery.

The design allows clarity of highlights and information hierarchy. Aesthetics and stylistic trends come and go. But the constant remains on defining the communication goal and ensuring the audience has a good user experience absorbing the message.

I would say generally keep an open mind on the industry because you never know what opportunities may arise. I wasn’t looking for a health sector type of job. But I find it’s a really good match for me, so I think it’s important to be open to all sectors. There are a lot of technicalities when it comes to Medical Science, so trying to help visualise that will be very important.