S8E2: Deanna Van Buren

Deanna Van Buren is the co-founder of Designing Justice Designing Spaces, a nonprofit working to end mass incarceration by building an alternative infrastructure.

For the Women’s Mobile Refuge Trailer, Van Buren and her team interviewed women who had been incarcerated about what they needed upon being released from prison in the middle of the night:

I was wrong about all my assumptions. Like, oh, they get out at 3:00 and they want to go to sleep. And that’s not what they want to do. They want to get a change of clothes. They want to meet with a caseworker. They want to figure out where they’re going. They want to sit in a comfortable chair, right? They haven’t sat sometimes for years in a comfortable chair.

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.