About Us
Well we are calling this project Made Collaborative. And if you happened to have read any of these blog entries, you probably already know that the project’s primary mission is to collaborate with participating urban youth to develop collaborative comics stories and other creative content based on their own interests and ideas. And by doing so, we hope to foster creative thought and provide a truly positive collaborative experience to participating youth and artists alike.
Our Story
That’s the project in a nutshell anyway. However, this project didn’t actually start off as a comic-based project. In fact, prior to starting this project, I don’t think I actually read a comic story from beginning to end in my entire life (and I’m certainly not proud to admit that now)
Indeed, when we started this project, it was just based on a very simple premise that perhaps something uniquely positively could potentially be generated by connecting urban youth with talented artists. What that “something” would ultimately become was anyone’s guess at the time. The main objective at the time was to just facilitate the collaborative process and see what came out of it.
And with time, what came out of it was this comic-based project. And as we move forward, we will try to capture just how this project has evolved over time in our project blog (the “This and That” blog entries on this website), culminating in the creation of our first comic series called “Back of the Yards” and, separately, the Made Collaborative Scholarship Fund, which will provide talented urban youth with opportunities to attend fully funded pre-collegiate educational programs of all types, fulfilling the very core of our project’s mission of urban youth empowerment.
And we will be using the Back of the Yards comic series (and any future comic series) as the basis for most of our future collaborations. With each new upcoming comic issue of Back of the Yards, we will identify a few topics and/or themes that will be focal points for the next issue’s story line (think of this as the internal pre-production process for each upcoming issue), and you can learn more about those collaborations and the comic itself right here!
The Mission & Vision Statements
The Mission Statement
Made Collaborative is a grass roots organization that develops unique comics-based content that is inspired by sponsored collaborations between participating urban youth, artists and others, designed to promote general understanding and also, through such collaborations and the Made Collaborative Scholarship Fund, youth empowerment.
The Vision Statement
Made Collaborative’s vision is to develop broad creative content inspired by collaborations in the pursuit of understanding, not to obtain “answers,” but rather, to help better reveal our shared humanity … and also just have a little fun along the way.
Our Rag Tag Group
This is a grass roots project in the truest sense. Started with a summer spent volunteering at a local Chicago after school program and evolved into today’s current incarnation. Just a rag tag group of artists trying to do something they thought was cool in their spare time. And if you’d like to learn about any us, just click on any of the mugs below.