CASE STUDY
The Missing Men
Five Smooth Stones Foundation | Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys
The foundation had a number it could not make anyone hear.
Anders Lindgren, then its director of operations, had pulled the public data and found something devastating: a Black boy in Baltimore was more likely to be murdered over the course of his life than to earn a college degree. The fact was real, it was sourced, and it was the whole reason the school existed. It was also inert. Stated as a statistic it produced a wince and then nothing. Stated as a comparison it sounded like rhetoric. The people who needed to understand it had heard versions of it before, and had built up the calluses that let them keep going.
The problem was not the information. The problem was that nobody could see it.
I built The Missing Men: one hundred boys on a page. At each milestone, the end of high school, the start of college, the degree, some of them fade. The ones still standing at the end are the ones the number had been describing all along, and the ones who faded are the ones the school was built to catch. There is no statistic on the page. There does not need to be. You count who is left, and you understand.
It became the foundation's primary way of explaining itself for several years, in every room where it had to make its case. It carried a campaign that raised more than a million dollars.
What the work actually was: not a graphic, and not copywriting. It was finding the version of a true thing that a person could hold in mind and repeat to someone else without losing any of it. That is most of what I do. The visual was just where it landed this time.
“After pulling publicly available data I was struggling to visualize and communicate a devastating fact: Black boys in Baltimore were more likely to be murdered over the course of their lifetime than to receive a college degree. George had the idea for and coached me through building the message: ‘The Missing Men.’ He created a visual of 100 boys, and showed how many would ‘fade out’ at each major educational milestone: how many would drop out of high school, how many would never attend college, how many would fail to graduate. We used this as the primary way to communicate our mission over multiple years, and as we raised more than $1m.”
Anders Lindgren, then Director of Operations, Five Smooth Stones Foundation; founder, SchoolOps
Prep@Collegiate
Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys | summer enrichment program
Before the campaign, the foundation asked me to build the school's summer program. The faculty designed it; I recruited them and ran the process. Then I ran the program itself, all of it: the schedule, the field trips, the chairs and the water coolers, and the two-minute film below, which I shot and edited.
From the program blog, summer 2017: The Thing about Data... and Character Counts, but How Do You Count It?, on teaching twelve-year-olds to read their own data.
“George came in to build our summer enrichment program and did something I had not seen before. Instead of arriving with a curriculum, he facilitated a process where the faculty he recruited designed it from the ground up — they knew middle school math better than he ever would — and then he stayed through the whole implementation, coaching people through the parts that went sideways. Design and execution were not separate phases handed to separate people, which is usually where these things fall apart.”
Anders Lindgren, then Director of Operations, Five Smooth Stones Foundation