Guest Lecture: Sally Rumble
Last month, MFA Products of Design was proud to host Sally Rumble, the fearless community building specialist, designer, and creative activist. Sally shared her personal journey of becoming a dedicated civil rights activist and using the power of design to spread her message.
Sally divided her lecture into three parts, which cleverly mirrored three levels of waking consciousness. First, she shared her experience immigrating to America and working as an industrial designer in New York City (which Sally calls the "dreaming REM sleep" state).
The second part of her talk focused on how she became disenchanted with the wastefulness of the product design industry and how she started her anti-racism education and civil rights activism involvement ("dreamless sleep" as Sally calls it). In the third part of the lecture (described as "waking"), Sally shared powerful examples of her creative activism projects and her upcoming podcast, White Work.
Sally Rumble is a New York-based community building specialist, designer, and creative activist. She helped CreativeMornings founder, Tina Roth Eisenberg scale a globally distributed event and speaker series for the creative community from 40+ cities, to 180+ in 63 countries, as Chief Happiness Officer. A former industrial designer, Sally applies her human-centered design methodology to her community and activism work. Last year she partnered with the Obama Foundation after launching and producing the We Love You project, a portrait project challenging the mainstream media's negative depiction of Black men in America. A civil rights activist with a focus on anti-racism, she has worked with Justice League NYC, a criminal justice reform focused organization and initiative of the Gathering for Justice founded by Harry Belafonte. Sally has also worked with Color of Change, the United States' largest online racial justice organization, and Children of Promise, embracing children of incarcerated parents & empowering them to break the cycle of intergenerational involvement in the criminal justice system. Last summer, she joined the Resistance Revival Chorus, organized by national Women's March organizers, and sings regularly at venues from neighborhood speakeasies to Carnegie Hall, spreading the message of freedom, equity and justice, through song.