Nebraska Appleseed is a nonprofit organization that fights for justice and opportunity for all Nebraskans. They take a systemic approach to complex issues - child welfare, immigration policy, affordable health care, and poverty - and they take their work wherever it will do the most good, whether that’s at the courthouse, in the statehouse or on the streets of our communities.

Each year Nebraska Appleseed asks for designers to volunteer their design to curate a group of 10 posters. Each poster is beautifully silkscreened onto French paper and sold during an annual organizational fundraiser and community awards banquet. Only thirty copies of each area signed and available in this limited edition run.

Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. While many of the urban areas of the country have begun to make systematic changes to legislation, policing and care, the Midwest lags. As a designer and professor, I research ways in which design thinking can be applied to achieve a broader societal impact. Here my strategy was simple, take the #1 symbol in the state, CORN (we are the Nebraska Cornhuskers) and draw it only using opioids.

The poster was extremely successful. We sold all but 8 posters at the opening event (that is a record). The poster has been displayed at social justice poster shows across the state and won a medal in the Nebraska AIGA design competition.

Nebraska Appleseed is a nonprofit organization that fights for justice and opportunity for all Nebraskans. We take a systemic approach to complex issues - child welfare, immigration policy, affordable health care, prison reform, and poverty. Assistant Professor Colleen Syron partners with Nebraska Appleseed to annually commission and curate an Art + Justice Poster exhibition.

This year’s theme was Sowing the Seeds of Justice. Real change doesn’t happen overnight, or from the efforts of any one person alone. It takes a community. Advocating for a better community, a different world than what we experience today, demands imagination, hope, and optimism. It requires a recognition that the small acts and work today will grow into something bigger and bolder than the initial seeds we plant. Working together, we are Sowing the Seeds of Justice for a stronger, vibrant, and inclusive community.

"A Threat to Justice" is my response to one of the most pressing issues of our time.
It is widely believed that many of our anti-drug laws have racially disfavored African Americans and low-income communities. While recent bipartisan legislation begins to reform some of the sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed African-Americans - “A Threat to Justice” is a call to action, a reminder, and a rally for America to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”