Students in the College of Business Administration started a Facebook and Instagram project titled People of ACU modeled after the famous Humans of New York movement.
Kelsea Marshall, a junior marketing major from San Antonio, began this project for her Information Systems class along with her classmates Kevin Carroll, a junior marketing major from Abilene, and Lydia Pinson, a junior accounting major from Cookeville, Tennessee. They have also brought Allison Brown, a junior convergence journalism major from Midland as a photographer.
People of ACU is designed to tell students’ stories and dig deeper than surface level interactions. A typical post includes one picture of a student and a quote that gives the audience more information about them.
This post model was designed after the HONY created by Brandon Stanton, which has flourished on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr and a published book. The movement, originally created to share the stories of people living in and visiting New York, has lead Stanton to do the same in select countries around the world, such as Iran. The style movement has also been pursued by individuals throughout the world, with Facebook hosting pages such as Souls of Society and Humans of Buenos Aires.
“I really like what [Stanton] does, and so I just wanted to try that at ACU,” Marshall said. “I think the community we have at ACU can really support this. People care about other people and want to get to know each other.”
Marshall said the team started with their friends as the subjects to launch the project, but have since started approaching people they do not know. All pictures and quotes are only used once the subject has given them permission.
In order to create these posts, Marshall asks the subjects questions that allow for them to talk about deeper things than just their name, major and hometown. Questions such as “What is your greatest struggle right now?” or “What’s one piece of advice you would give someone else?” which tend to warrant insight to the subject’s life.
“It’s hard because some people don’t want to give a lot of information, which I totally understand, but from the stuff they do give, you just hear something and you think ‘That’s it’,” Marshall said.
Marshall said she plans to continue this project past the assignment’s due date if everything goes as planned and it receives positive feedback.
“I just want people to be more aware and more understanding of the culture and community here at ACU,” Marshall said. “It would be cool to have a student body who cares about each other and can reach out to each other. It can be this connecting factor that brings people together.”
You can find this project at http://www.facebook.com/peopleofacu or http://www.instagram.com/people_of_acu.
