Running, Rights, & Land — Brooklyn — tenpeaksbeforelunch // nate bender

The problem

Develop an interactive, engaging ArcGIS Storymap to bring the curriculum to life for a new program focused on immigrant rights, empowerment, and community building.

Touching Land is a 501c(3) non-profit dedicated to using hands-on experiential arts and mindfulness as a tool for community-building, collective grounding, healing and immigrant empowerment. TL focuses on using bodies (running), land (clay), food (decolonizing) and textiles as their main working tools.

TL developed a new program called Running, Rights, and Land, that uses running as a way to bring seasoned runners and new neighbors/recent immigrants together for 10 weeks to run together, talk about their individual and shared power, legal rights, climate justice, and to explore the power they have together to build a more equitable community.

The first iteration of the program took place in Brooklyn, New York, in fall 2024.

We wanted to build a Storymap that brings the RRL program to life by highlighting some of the social and environmental inequities the program is designed to address (for instance, visualizing how the interplay of asthma rates and poverty results in health disparities across NYC), and by providing a home for participants to access the resources (or learn more!) that Carolina and her team provide throughout the program. Lastly, the Storymap serves as a marketing tool for the program; something that TL can use to recruit participants, mentors, partners, and funders for future programs.

Approach

I used the Storymaps platform to accomplish this project because of its strong ability to weave together geographic information with various other media like images, videos, audio, and data visualizations into a story that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Skills

Research: conducted self-directed research into social and environmental inequities in New York City and more broadly across the U.S.

Branding/design: building on Touching Land’s brand standards, I created over two dozen custom charts and graphics, as well as background video, to create an aligned, professional look and feel.
Writing/editing: working alongside Carolina Rubio MacWright, Executive Director of Touching Land, I wrote and edited the written content.
GIS: created custom maps that feature a variety of data layers and interactive popups that contribute to the overall story.
Data Analysis & Visualization: visualized research results of social and environmental inequities in a variety of charts within the Storymap.

Results

The RRL Brooklyn program launched on September 15 and, two weeks in, is off to a great start. I’ll be updating this page with results once the program finishes.