YorkU x Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research
Promoting student engagement with current global health issues through educational and gamified experiences.
Role: Graphic designer, campaign manager
Client: Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research student chapter at York University
Skills: Graphic design, marketing strategy
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Canva
Context and role
The Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research (CCGHR) student chapter at York University (YorkU x CCGHR) is a student-led club that raises awareness about global health issues and research, facilitates networking opportunities for students, and promotes the vision and values of its parent organization.
YorkU x CCGHR hosts multiple events every year open to the student body. For the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years, in addition to my responsibilities as Vice President of Internal Affairs and Executive Vice President, respectively, I designed graphics and promotional material for our events.
The following are three selected events I designed material for as part of our marketing strategies.
Discuss this. The Madagascar Plague Outbreak
Bringing attention to the Madagascar plague outbreak through open discussion | 2017
We wanted our first event to be centred on current global health news and be a topic a lot of students in the Global Health program or students interested in global health could engage and empathize with. At the time, the Madagascar pneumonic plague outbreak was starting to de-escalate but had gained global attention with 143 deaths reported on November 8, 2017. So, we decided to hold a one-hour open discussion on it – something that could evolve into a series of global health talks called Discuss this.
To promote the event online, I created 3 facts-based Facebook posts for the club page to go out in the week leading up to it. A month after the event, I posted a follow-up graphic with an update on the global health situation.
Global Health Simulator – Norovirus at PyeongChang 2018
Exploring choices under pressure and consequential decisions | 2018
Our planning for our second event coincided with the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea in which an outbreak of norovirus, a stomach virus that spreads easily in cramped environments, occurred. Naturally, we decided to create a global health simulation based on the developing news. In our Global Health Simulator, participants worked in groups and assumed roles of different stakeholders (e.g. athletes, security staff, Olympic executives, epidemiologists, government officials, etc.) at the Olympic Games to work together to tackle the outbreak.
In the weeks leading up to the Global Health Simulator, I posted 7 graphics to Facebook and created a poster that was advertised on walls throughout the university campus.
Will you escape Disease X?
Navigating a pandemic one clue at a time | 2019
For our biggest event of the 2018-19 academic year, we designed an escape room for students to test their global health knowledge and skills. Challenges included using a spinning wheel, answering multiple choice questions, puzzles, and finding the final key to escape. The storyline was centred on escaping a rising pandemic dubbed Disease X.
For this campaign, I created 7 Facebook graphics and a poster posted all over the university campus.
