At the Koa Fund’s Koa Cafés, where young people have a chance to express their feelings and build on their strengths, participants’ comments are captured not by a scribe taking notes but via graphic recording.
With graphic recording, an artist standing at a large paper-covered tackboard with multiple non-erasable colored markers in hand listens, synthesizes and translates the words spoken by others into drawn images, bringing the conversation to life visually in real time.
For the Koa Fund, the idea of graphic recording stemmed from weekly sessions with the organization’s Youth Connection Cultivators (YCC) in which everyone in attendance doodles, draws or takes notes on a white-paper table covering.
“These become like the minutes from a meeting,” says Gabi Suárez-Starfeldt, whose family created the Koa Fund after losing their daughter to suicide. “Dean (Gabi’s husband) takes photos of these sheets and puts the images on our Google Drive. Twice a year, we have a bonfire and burn all the papers to release the emotional energy. The smoke signals deep grief and deep gratitude, always entwined.”
For their first Koa Café, the Koa Fund hired a professional graphic recorder, which they say was “quite expensive.” Following that café, a young woman on the YCC, 15-year-old Alexandra Nash, showed a talent for this craft. The founders supported her online graphic recording courses and Nash practiced her skill at less formal Koa Fund meetings, using a 4-foot by 9-foot tackboard and three or four markers made specifically for graphic recording.
Nash was the graphic recorder for the second Koa Café, in 2023. “She has grown exponentially in her capacity for doing this, and she’s grown in confidence in herself,” Gabi says.
For AOK Day in 2024, Nash set up her tackboard on the porch of the Suárez-Starfeldt home, in the Stuart Avenue neighborhood. As Koa Fund volunteers were out distributing heart-shaped fidget pillows in the community, they posed a question to the recipients: “What is the most meaningful gift you’ve ever given or received?” They called or texted the results of these encounters to Nash, whose graphic recording of the day-long event was livestreamed through the Koa Fund’s Instagram channel.
“Everything from that day is on that board. Everything illustrated is from conversations we had out in the community, where people shared in the most vulnerable ways,” says Gabi.
Nash’s involvement was not just a one-and-done contribution. She drew the “Heart Balloon Girl” art that is featured in event graphics and brought to life as 3D-printed figures attached to the AOK Day fidget pillows, and she made the crown Koa wore for the Honor Walk to donate her organs at Bronson Hospital.
Now 19, Nash is taking art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, supporting her education through graphic recording and “creative gig work” to help organizations and other artists with their work.
“The chance through which I was able to become associated with the Koa Fund has become an amazing opportunity to express myself as an artist, and to create in new, different ways that give me possibilities outside of the Koa Fund to further myself as an artist,” Nash says.
