Rachel Edidin and Dean Trippe team up to create a new charitable organization, Sequential Heart. Sequential Heart aims to distribute comic books to disadvantaged children.
Edidin and Trippe saw the need in the community around them and responded to it. In 2007, they came up with the idea to somehow move comics from retailers, publishers, and fans in the comics community to these youth programs, who would then distribute them for free to the kids they helped. In December, Edidin and Trippe made a few test runs to see whether their plan was feasible, with the hopes of one day taking it national. It worked, and Sequential Heart was born.“Sequential Heart was my baby,” Edidin said, “and it grew out of my frustration with the number of comics that end up wasted, destroyed, or hovering in warehouse limbo for decades. It seemed like someone MUST want these books, or have use for them. At the same time, I was reading about a huge number of families being displaced in the wake of natural disasters, which got me thinking about how rotten it is to be a displaced kid - that even if your basic physical needs are being met, it’s a tremendously tedious and dispiriting experience. Kids need fun as well as food - it’s developmentally essential, in fact. So, I was mulling over this stuff, and I ran across a thread on the message board, where someone was asking how the comics community could respond
to the SoCal wild fires, and something just clicked.
Rachel elaborates on GWOG:
An update since the article was written: We’ve now donated over a hundred comics to organizations in and around Portland and have developed ongoing relationships with several of those. With luck, our website will be up and running within the next week or so, at which point we’re hoping to see an explosion of both requests and donations.
February 5th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I’ll be signing up to donate. I’d feel much better about my collection being read by more people, rather than stagnating in the long boxes.