Writing Studies Student Designs Campaign to Support People with Substance Use Disorders

Valencia Ruprecht has been hard at work with Wilderness Health Minnesota, designing a campaign to support people and communities struggling with substance use disorder.

The campaign has begun to appear in print and online. Below, you can see a page of the Lake County Press, the newspaper of Two Harbors and Lake County, Minnesota, with Valencia’s ad design.  The ad also runs on Wilderness Health Minnesota Instagram and Wilderness Health Minnesota Facebook.  Their goal is to help residents of Northeast Minnesota, from Grand Marais to Grand Rapids, from Duluth to Ely and all points between, find help.

According to Valencia’s supervisor, Zomi Bloom, “Valencia has excelled at every aspect of the marketing and design process, from researching and generating marketing personae for the communities we intend to reach, to innovative design and implementation in online and print media.  And, their design for a canvas bag is a real hit.”  (The design for the canvas bag is below.)

 

Valencia’s design for a bag given to hundreds of people at community health fairs and other events

 

Bloom supervises telehealth and other mental and behavioral health initiatives in the region.  Bloom says, about her intern, Valencia, “The online posts have driven real engagement, and real awareness, of mental health issues in our region.”

Valencia has one more year as a student at UMD, completing a degree in Writing Studies with a minor in Arts in Media.  Valencia has integrated writing and visual communication strategies across courses and projects, including a contribution to this published anthology: https://pressbooks.umn.edu/umdmemoirwriting2024/chapter/watercolor/ 

 

 

For more information about the Major in Writing Studies and other opportunities at UMD, visit https://cahss.d.umn.edu/elws.  For internships like the one Valencia completed, see: https://cahss.d.umn.edu/departments/english-linguistics-writing-studies/writing-studies-program/writing-studies-internships 

 

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