Applied Innovations with Sara O'Keeffe
The work of the Achievement & Assessment Institute (AAI) and its centers encompass a vast range of services, solutions, and partnerships. In our short interview series, Applied Innovations, we get to know some of the talented members of our team and their projects, across seven centers and various areas of impact.
In this edition, we meet Sara O'Keeffe, Graphic Designer with AAI's Center for Public Partnerships & Research.
Can You Tell Us a Little About Yourself? I’m Sara O’Keeffe, a graphic designer, illustrator, and graphic recorder. I provide these services for the Center for Public Partnerships and Research (CPPR) and to outside partners. I am from and currently live in Topeka, KS, where my partner Karl and I are raising our two kids (3-year-old and 7-month-old) and our 3 cats. I love bicycling and adventure, whether that is a cross-country trip or across town to the ice cream shop or to transport the kids to and from school.
What Attracted You To Your Field? In college, I started to experiment with combining humanitarian work with art. At the time, I worked with some amazing advocates and volunteers implementing art into a support group at a safe home for women and children. That weekly support group taught me many lessons, one being the value of art and how it can be an outlet, a connection to information, to efforts, to people, to expression, and to other perspectives. With non-profit/grant funded work of that nature, by which I mean the hard, hands-on work, the work that challenges your own emotional health to bear witness to the trauma and pain in your own community, I made the decision to take a break from direct service. It was important to me to move into a supportive role for those who are in direct service and find ways to elevate their voices, their efforts and do so in a creative way. I’ve been with CPPR for going on 8 years now.
What Populations Do You or Your Center Support? We support partner work and those who serve children and families, such as KS Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund, Department of Children and Families, KS Department of Health and Environment, KS Department of Education, and many more.
What Are Your or Your Center’s Key Projects? Our work is broad and encompasses many projects related to the well-being of children and families. Many of those include working to develop or better systems to understand and meet the needs of Kansas families so they can thrive. Working on the Design and Communications Team I am involved in almost all projects addressing public health, early childhood education and care, family well-being, parent supports, maternal child health, and substance use illness.
For example, over the past 7 years I’ve provided graphic recording for DCCCA, a community partner, at their Opioids & Stimulants conference. Or, that time when Dolly Parton came to Kansas, our team handled the created the design and print materials. Or the time when Ahmed Best came to host the AfroRithms future event when they dared to imagine and unearth ancestral intelligence, as well as un-erase the Black, indigenous, queer, and disabled experience of struggle and liberation. These are some exciting events that are creative in their design to address difficult subject matter, that I am so honored to support.
What Are Some Future Opportunities or Upcoming Initiatives That Excite You? Streamlining data collection across the state, for instance, is inspiring to me because our partners have been able to make a connection between the increase in child welfare cases and the lack of available childcare. I’m hopeful that this valuable work that we support our partners in will continue to address necessary changes across the state, because without childcare we fail families.
