art4aid: Use Your Art to Make a Difference

Stir is a youth initiative of World Vision Australia, they run various design, art, music and youth culture projects to involve a younger generation into taking an interest in world events. Art4Aid, just one of their initiatives, is an art/design competition, with an aim to help spread the message across Australia that we can and want to Make Poverty History!

Art4Aid theme for 2007 is global poverty and how we can make it history. Closing date for entries is 1 June 2007.

Make the jump to see winners from last year and to learn more about Stir.

Image: 1.2 billion without water By Tristain Tait, Winner from Art4Aid 2006

The gang behind Stir, the movers and shakers (if you will), have a wonderfully inspiring manifesto - here is an excerpt:

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. ... Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. ... We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mind shift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. ... Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.