About

Hear-Our-Voice-by-Liza-Donovan-at-the-Nashville-Women's-March

We are a community of artists and advocates making art with purpose. We run crowdsourced campaigns around causes, inviting anyone and everyone to contribute their own meaningful designs. We then develop those designs into a range of physical goods, from posters to apparel to home goods, which we sell online, and in retailers all over the country, supporting artists and causes with every purchase.


Partners


We partner with non-profit and cause-based organizations to help tell stories and engage community. We also donate 1% of sales revenue to our non-profit partners. Please get in touch with us if you'd like to partner on a campaign! 


Retailers


We’re proud to have partnered with the following retailers to grow our artists’ impact:

   

Press


                     

Awards


Affiliations



The Team

 

Max Slavkin, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Max has a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Jazz Studies from the University of Southern California. He believes deeply in the power of art to affect social change, and works with our non-profit and retail partners to expand the reach and impact of our artists' work. He's a proud alumnus of the Coro Fellows Program In Public Affairs, and is doing his best to be the change.

Aaron Perry-Zucker, Co-Founder & Creative Director

Aaron is a designer, entrepreneur and community organizer with a B.F.A in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Before co-founding Creative Action Network in 2013 he co-founded Big New Ideas, a bi-coastal design firm that served non-profit, startup and corporate clients like Timbuk2, Nike Foundation, and Upworthy from 2009 through 2012. He was recognized as a part of the GOOD100 in 2013.

Email / Portfolio / LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram

Christina Langley Bang, Merchandising and Licensing Director

A merchandising and licensing expert with extensive experience building brands, executing strategic plans and delivering financial results. Christina's prior executive positions include Senior Director, Apparel, Accessories and Footwear, at DreamWorks Animation, and Director of Apparel at Disney Consumer Products. She has a strong focus on marketing, collaborations, co-branding and creative licensing solutions. She is also a product development guru who integrates design, fashion and innovation into her projects.

Email / LinkedIn

Holly Savas, Director Brand, Marketing & Community

Holly Savas is an artist and brand marketing consultant who graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in Business and Spanish. She thrives on variety, having lived abroad, worked for both global companies and startups, and ran her own company for many years. She chairs the arts program at her local public school and is a passionate supporter of the arts and arts education. She is a winner of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Finalist Award for artists with families. 

Email / LinkedIn 

Advisors

Corey Ford Matter.vc

Corey is the CEO of Matter, a start-up accelerator that supports media entrepreneurs building a more informed, connected, and empowered society. Prior to Matter, He taught design thinking innovation at the Institute of Design at Stanford University. Corey began his career in public broadcasting managing the production of 17 films for the PBS/WGBH series FRONTLINE, winning an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton Award.

Website / Twitter

Sheri Conn

Sheri Conn is a strategic global marketing and business executive who’s driven world-class brands for 20 years. She's served as Head of Worldwide Television Brand Marketing and Senior Vice President of Franchise Development at DreamWorks, Vice President of Brand Marketing at Paramount and Director of Global Marketing at Disney.  Sheri began her brand career at M&M Mars and Kimberly-Clark after earning a B.S. in Engineering and M.B.A. in Marketing from the University of Cincinnati.

Van Jones Civil Rights Advocate

Van Jones is the c-host of CNN's Crossfire and the president and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for bottom-up, people-powered innovations to help fix the U.S. economy. A Yale-educated attorney, Van has written two New York Times Best Sellers: The Green Collar Economy, the definitive book on green jobs, and Rebuild the Dream, a roadmap for progressives in 2012 and beyond.

Christie George 

Christie George is one of the country’s leading experts on investing in mission-driven startups. As Director of New Media Ventures, an angel network and seed fund focused on accelerating progressive innovation, Christie has catalyzed investment into some of the fastest growing for-profit and nonprofit startups of the last few years including Upworthy, CrowdTangle (acquired by Facebook) and SumOfUs.

Website / Twitter

Steven Heller Author, Art Director

Steven Heller wears many different hats — in addition to the New York Yankees: For thirty three years he was an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review. 

Website / Twitter

Natalie Foster Peers

Natalie is the executive director of Peers, a member-driven organization that supports the sharing economy movement. We believe that by sharing what we already have — like cars, homes, skills and time — everyone benefits in the process. spent the last decade at the intersection of social movements and technology. Prior to Peers, she was the digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) and the Democratic National Committee.

Website / Twitter

Peter Koechley Upworthy

Peter Koechley is Co-Founder and Curator-In-Chief of Upworthy, a new mission-driven media company dedicated to bringing mass attention to the things that really matter using irresistible social media. Before Upworthy, Peter produced viral media for the advocacy organisation MoveOn.org, was Managing Editor of The Onion (America's Finest News Source) and co-created the Onion News Network. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, son, and dog.

Jenny 8 Lee Plympton

Journalist, writer, dumpling-maker and non-linear thinker. Wrote a book about Americanized Chinese food. Occasionally heard on NPR. Coined the term "man date." Survived Colbert. Awesome Food trustee. Hacks/Hackers organizer. An Esquire ``Woman We Love.`` Majored in applied math. On TED.com. Thinking about the future of news and virality. Amateur headhunter and matchmaker (which are very similar).

Website / Twitter

Dr. Jim Pugh ShareProgress

Jim has spent the last five years working in the progressive data and technology space, starting on the 2008 Obama campaign and continuing as the Director of Analytics & Development at Organizing for America. Jim has a Ph.D. in distributed robotics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

 

Origins

In the summer of 2008, during Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign, Shepard Fairey’s famous HOPE poster started popping up across the country, inspiring artists and designers to join the campaign. Aaron Perry-Zucker, about to start his senior year at RISD and already designing for the campaign, was one of those designers and (when prompted by Design Observer and with the help of Adam Meyer) launched designforobama.org where anyone could upload a poster in support of the campaign, and all posters were available for free downloads at print-able sizes. Hundreds of artists contributed incredible art, and caught the attention of activist and filmmaker Spike Lee who was interested in helping to publish the collection. Later that year the collection was published by Taschen Books and included an essay from design author and historian Steven Heller.

After that experience, many of the participating designers came back asking: what’s next? Max joined Aaron to try and figure that out, first working as a client-based design agency. Our last client was the incredible team at Upworthy in 2012, which taught us how to start a company, and inspired us to go all in. In January 2013, CAN was born.