Donate Your Coat

Here is a great idea done by JWT, in New York. Winter is an especially treacherous time for the homeless in New York. It's when the mercury can easily drop below freezing and stay there for weeks at a time. And it's not like the homeless can go and get their winter coats from the closet because, well, homeless people don't have closets. So when winter comes, they're ill prepared for it. It's not uncommon for the homeless to freeze to death on the streets.

Every year JWT has a coat drive where we try to get people to donate their old coats for the homeless. They wanted to create a piece of communication to help hammer home why, and stir people into rummaging through their closets again. So they created an installation.

The idea was to paint a giant homeless person on a wall and place coat hooks on the upper half of his body. As people hang their donated coats on the hooks. A giant coat is formed, clothing the giant figure. Julie Rutigliano, is an artist who paints murals and volunteered her time to paint the sixteen foot homeless figure. She was set up on a cherry picker with a few cans of paint and a mild feeling of queasiness. It's high up there. She managed to drive the cherry picker into the wall leaving a large hole by our homeless person's foot that had to be fixed.

The building managers were not happy. Memos were sent. Phone calls made. Much grumpiness ensued. But the wall got fixed and the installation got finished. In the end we ran into the problem of perhaps being a little too successful. We had too many coats to cover the figure in the end. About four times too many.