The Margin - Ode Partners
The Margin
The goal: to center the hidden stories of the environmental justice movement using storytelling and data.
We started by building a brand from the ground up. We defined a mission and vision, and came up with a brand name, The Margin, to elicit our unique positioning: a data-driven storytelling platform that exposes the ongoing cycle of unjust actions that intentionally push the poor and people of color to the edge of society while driving our planet to the brink of collapse.
We designed a bold visual identity system to support a mix of interactive data visualizations and in-depth reporting across the website, social media, events, and anywhere else people experience the brand.
National efforts to address environmental justice typically use data that has not been collected or analyzed with a local or nuanced perspective, leaving folks lost in the data. Communities are left to fill in the gaps through local efforts to test and survey their environments, but those efforts are rarely taken seriously by policymakers.
With this in mind, data scientists sourced reliable data for The Margin to surface environmental injustices, to ground conversations in a common set of facts, and provide the basis for action.
By pairing in-depth reporting with data, we sought to immerse readers in the issues, to look back historically and see how the landscape has changed, to understand where we are now, how we got here, and where we go next.
We worked with independent journalists, with support from our editorial team, to produce five in-depth, feature-length articles about five different communities in the U.S. The result was nuanced, intimate stories of environmental justice, told through personal stories, photography, and data visualizations.
We published the five-part series on the website and across social media to mark the 40th anniversary of the environmental justice movement.
The Webby Awards recognized The Margin with a Silver Anthem Award in the news and journalism category. The award recognized media projects aiming to raise awareness for sustainability, environment, and climate causes.
The Margin was founded by Bryce Cracknell in partnership with the nonprofit Earth Genome.