The Social Street India creates Life Before Ashes campaign for Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network
An estimated 5 lakh people die in India every year due to unavailability of organs that can be transplanted. Although public awareness has increased in recent years, a lot of conversation is limited to hospitals and the prevalence of organ donations in the country continues to be very poor.
In order to tackle this challenge, The Social Street and MOHAN Foundation (Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network), an Indian NGO and non-profit organisation created a powerful campaign – ‘Life Before Ashes’ – to raise awareness for the importance and shortage of organ donations in India. The campaign featured a set of clever and hard-hitting installations of human organs to highlight this urgency and make the concept of organ donation more acceptable.
The four installations included – a human heart, liver, eyeball and kidneys – made from a mix of real human ashes and mud from graves. A clear and simple message to make people realize, ‘that what has now become ashes, could have been another human’s heart or kidney. If only the organs were donated.’
The Foundation attempts to highlight this irony with the help of these unique installations, while also urging people to sign up and become organ donors. The campaign tries to expand the notion of organ transplant by focusing on the merits of organ donation, highlighting the declining number of registrations and bringing to focus the social stigma attached to organ donation in India.
The four installations have already drawn the curiosity of people across cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Jaipur. MOHAN Foundation plans to take the installations to more malls, hospitals and public places in more cities in India as well as hospitals in the UK.
The campaign won two Gold and five Silver metals at the Goafest Abbys 2018, in the categories of Public Relations (CSR), Out of Home and Ambient Media, Still Craft (Copywriting), Branded Content & Entertainment, Still Other, Promotion/ Activation and Integrated.