Spirit of Philanthropy, was a collaborative submission between The Basile Center Design Scholars, Anthony Carranza and myself for IU Foundation’s Spirit of Philanthropy Awards. Through the conceptual thinking of this piece, we visualized the spirit of philanthropy as something that captures cooperation, support, balance, uplift and peace. All of which have a strong emotional connection to our experience with philanthropy.

That experience was best represented with this metaphor of tessellating birds that work together as a whole to create a rising balloon. The birds representing those brave enough to take flight from the nest without guaranteed safety and the balloon representing IU Foundation as the helping hand in providing those in need of safe flight. By using the laser engraver, the machine reinforced our idea of cooperation, support, balance, uplift and peace by ensuring that each shape was physically reliant on each other to create this peaceful image of what we saw as the spirit of philanthropy.