2011 Jay Chiat Awards Winners

For Good Strategy—Silver
McKinney
Urban Ministries of Durham | "Spent"

Most people assume they'll never be homeless. Even if they lost their job and money got tight, they contend they'd find a way to stay afloat. Even if it means working at McDonald's.

Homelessness is seen as something that happens only to those who have given up—"lost causes" like drunks, addicts and the mentally disabled. It's easy for the rest of "us" to dismiss efforts to help "them."

So how did we use a tiny organization—Urban Ministries of Durham—to change the national conversation on homelessness without a dime of paid media? By making it not about homelessness, but rather what it’s like to live on the brink of it. And by tapping into the wild popularity of online social gaming.

SPENT is a first-person-perspective game that forces people to relate to difficult decisions that lead to homelessness. Not whether to sleep under a bridge or in a park, but whether to buy groceries or pay for a child's school field trip. Decisions we can relate to.

Donations have increased, but the real measure of success is convincing more than a half million people to challenge their long-held assumptions of an age-old and often overlooked problem.

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