Design 21: Social Design Network

Mercy Corps, the global relief and development organization, is developing a powerful new resource in the fight against global hunger and poverty - an innovative, museum-quality Action Center in the heart of Lower Manhattan. The Action Center to End World Hunger, scheduled to open in October 2008, is a platform for education and action, helping visitors better understand what they can do to become part of the solution.

Each night, almost one billion people around the world go to bed hungry. Yet hunger itself is a symptom of wider problems faced by communities in every country. The Action Center will use hunger as an organizing symbol of poverty, helping to explain and illustrate the challenges that lay behind it, such as poor agricultural practices, inefficient markets, weak health and education services, environmental degradation, conflict, and lack of access to clean water. By identifying and highlighting these underlying issues, the Action Center seeks to generate the public will necessary to create lasting change.

With almost 30 years of experience working in the world's toughest places, Mercy Corps has come to realize that without a well-informed, mobilized constituency in the developed world, there is a fundamental limit to the success we will have in pursuing our mission of alleviating suffering, poverty and oppression. The solutions to the most complex global challenges require partnership between the people and governments of the world's economically powerful nations, as well as those of the countries where these challenges are most deeply felt. To that end, Mercy Corps has launched its Global Engagement initiative to radically alter the way people think about the world, and their role within it. The Action Center is one cornerstone of that initiative.

Designed by Ed Schlossberg and his team at ESI Design, the Action Center will attract visitors of all ages - with an emphasis on students, their parents and their teachers. Located just west of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, the Action Center will welcome an estimated 100,000 visitors each year, including local residents, school groups, and tourists to New York from around the world.

In summer 2009, the Action Center will be joined by a companion center in Portland, Oregon. Together, the Action Centers will serve as the physical anchors of a movement of globally engaged citizens who are committed to ending hunger and poverty.