At nine years old, I stopped growing up. Sure I got older, grew taller, graduated high school, went to college, got married, became a father, and even started to look old. But in some ways I’m still nine years old.
You see, I’m an unashamed geek and I love superheroes. I think of this as remnants of my inner nine year old. With this love comes unabashed optimism and lofty dreams. Anything is possible when you problem solve with a nine year old mentality and ideals. Anything is possible.
For instance, changing the way we change the world.
When we were founding RU we were hoping to purchase the domain www.resourcesunited.com. Fortunately, in hindsight, it was already taken. This forced us to explore a couple of other options before eventually settling on ResourcesUnite, sans “d”.
At first glance, ResourcesUnite doesn’t make much sense as a name. And in truth it has caused some confusion. After all, if resources are going to band together, wouldn’t we would say they are “united”?
But what if we set the stage in a different way? What if the resources in question weren’t objects but instead were living, breathing things? And what if these living resources banded together, put on some tights, flew to the rooftops, put their rings together and heroically called out, “Resources Unite!”
Now that would be exciting. And it was. From the onset of RU my 9 year old self was indulged. However, being mindful we didn’t want RU to be thought of as a comic book company we started to tone down the comic book motifs while keeping the playful theme of exuberence.
I ended up creating a rocket ship in the initial logo for the site. The rocket set the tone for what RU wanted to do: blast off, reach for the skies, launch new ideas and ideals. Simply, to take us to new places not yet explored.
I know, lofty.
The rocket logo would continue to be reduced visually on the site in subsequent revisions. But eventually Kari Bahl brilliantly placed the original rocket in the “R” of our RU logo. For me, seeing the rocket come full circle, subtly in our logo, yet still so prominent, was a perfect blend of my 9 year old spirit and my adult ideals.
Now lets come full circle.
Tom Rauen from Envision Screen Printing and Embroidery was interested in partnering with RU to help spread our message of “Changing the Way We Change the World”. We quickly realized if we were going to make RU T-shirts they had to be RU Orange and they have to have the RU logo on the front. We immediately agreed the logo should be a heroic call to action for anyone who wears the shirt.
We came up with a simple emblem that looks like something you would find on the chest of a super hero. And while we have a ton of icons, content and tag lines we would like to share we knew the front needed to be bold, simple and heroic.
But how will a shirt be heroic? Well that’s where you come in.
We’re giving 500 RU t-shirts away for free. But there’s a catch. When you receive one of our shirts you need to tell us one thing that inspires you about our community. This could be an act of kindness you witnessed, a time you volunteered or any other action that made a positive impact on people’s lives.
We want to capture the inspiring stories of our communities everyday heroes.
Once we give away 500 shirts we’ll have 500 stories of heroism to share. We’ll post all 500 stories of inspiration and volunteerism and create a team of RU volunteers and inspiration leaders.
A team of RU superheroes if you will.
Please let us know if you want a t-shirt through our Facebook page or reach out to us on Twitter @ResourcesUnite.
500 heroic t-shirts, 500 heroic stories.
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