As Liv interns at FASD United, she will be sharing the things she is learning and doing to inspire and explore FASD awareness through a public health lens. In her time with our organization, she will have opportunities to experience the roundedness of our programs, aid in important projects, and explore her understanding through reflection.

“This week one of my main projects was redesigning FASD United fact sheets and updating them, which is
a project that I started last week. I love redesigning the fact sheets with the Seat at the Table mission.

I enjoy the creative side of this internship I get to explore. I’ve always loved doing PowerPoints, flyers, or any other type of design for my public health classes. I am glad that I get to use some of the skills that I learned and apply them to these projects. I also am learning so much about design through my projects this week. What I didn’t know before is that when designing projects for individuals, you really have to focus on the details. It is important that everything looks cohesive and clean, and that the most important statistics or messages are highlighted while also making it not too overwhelming for the reader. It’s taken me a lot of trial and error when I designed the fact sheets to get it to where I feel confident enough for it to be distributed. I was also glad to hear some outside opinions on my designs, so this week I focused on
implementing those comments while also putting my own spin on them. In addition, I liked updating all of the information, I got to put in our new address which was very exciting. I also am using the new colors from our mission as well as picking out images that are non-stigmatizing. I enjoy that I get to use our language and stigma guide for these projects. One of my main priorities is making sure that all of the language and images I use are non-stigmatizing and respectful.

While these projects may seem like a simple redesign, they can be quite time-consuming and frustrating at times, as I want to make sure that everything is perfect. I loved how I got to work on multiple fact sheets, such as ‘What Educators Should Know about FASD and PAE’ and ”What the Justice System Should Know about FASD and PAE.’ If I got overwhelmed with one fact sheet redesign, I’d go on to the next one. I would then come back to the previous fact sheet with a better mindset, and I’m overall very proud of myself for the redesigns that I did this week!

I’m currently working on doing some research for resizing an image for Google ads. What is very interesting about Google ads is they do sizing by pixels and not by inches, so I’ve had to do some deeper digging into how to make my pixels appropriate for us to have these Google ads. I’m going to continue to work on this throughout next week so I can have our ads ready to go! I am also about officially halfway through my internship. I can’t believe how much I’ve accomplished and learned so far, and I am so excited for the future at FASD United.”

Reflection from 2/26 to 3/01 2024