Urbed x Collective Climb:

The other day whilst on the I-676, a road I had taken many times over and whose proper name I had never know and simply resorted to calling “the expressway to nostalgia,” I came across a curious billboard sign: an older black couple staged in embrace with the unornamented imperative “Smile More.”  The radical simplicity of its messaging is perhaps what invites the most consternation; in the absence of a market rationale “why does someone want me to smile more and what do they have to gain” I was thrown into a moment of unease and alienation. One might say I was thinking, “how did they know I could smile more” and subsequently, “who are they and why do they want me to smile at all?” But to focus on the effect of this piece distracts from a sustained attention to the form of the billboard device and through what modalities it was able to secure this fascinating moment of encounter between Instructor (billboard) and referent (me). One way to repose this thinking is to ask, who was this elderly black couple? Indeed, such an inquiry already concedes that it takes up a number of provisional assumptions: namely, that they were a couple at all! It would likely be useful at this point to confirm for the reader that yes, they were a man and a woman, whose very heteronormativity, or perhaps better yet my own, made possible that the sign of two members of the opposite sex, inoffensively locked in embrace, was anything but platonic in the Non-Platonian sense. What is interesting here is not to pursue a line of critique where we punish the consumer, me, for not being woke enough or interesting enough to read for the visual language of relationality that exceeds the essentialism of heteropatriarchy (that is a project for another day). No, what is useful here is to think about the remarkable ability for one formulation of sociality “man and woman” to achieve such a lucid and immediate communicative function through the protocols of partnership. Heteronormativity here is mobilized as an expression of union and relationship in order to translate an inoffensive imagistic symbol that doesn’t distract from the instruction “smile more.” In fact maybe it is even in supplemental to it: “you can smile more if you are in a heteropatriarchal union.” But again that is besides the point. The marketing genius of the billboard is in its use of Partnership, or one configuration of partnership, to communicate with rapid efficiency a massive extra-lexical message.  

It is my hope that such an attention to the semiotic and expressive capacities of partnerships within the billboard can also help attune us to another form of partnership and all that it too can communicate as well. A long way of saying, we are beyond ecstatic to announce that Collective Climb will be partnering with sister Philadelphia nonprofit, UrbEd! UrbEd equips students in Philadelphia with the knowledge and confidence to not only engage with the conditions of their scholastic and communal environments, but advance these causes on the register of the structural and political. Owing to the generosity of its leadership, and the vocational alignment of our two organizations, UrbEd has pledged to contribute a generous $5,000 to our Restorative Community Project operating budget. With a gift of this size, we will now be able to sponsor four full youth stipends ($4,800) and two Native guest speakers for a total of 320 hours of restorative training. 

To read this burgeoning partnership between Collective Climb and UrbEd is to make room for the possible. The possibility of improving vertical educational outcomes for more and more Philadelphia youth. The possibility of fostering greater grass-roots change for durable community safety and restoration in our neighborhoods. And the possibility of indeed Smiling more. Here's to our many partnerships. Here is to our many possibilities.