Founded in 2010 by Aimée Knight, the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative is a community-engaged writing program in the Department of Communication, Film, and Journalism at Saint Joseph’s University. Under Knight’s continuing direction, Beautiful Social brings students, faculty, and community partners together to co-create writing, design, and digital media projects shaped by community priorities.
Across more than 160 projects in Philadelphia, throughout the United States, and internationally, we have collaborated with nonprofit organizations, advocates, grassroots organizations, Indigenous communities, and people who are currently and formerly incarcerated.
Our work is grounded in community-led design, an approach in which community partners help shape a project's process, goals, and outcomes from beginning to end. We focus on reciprocity, community knowledge, and building capacity that remains with communities after a project ends.
To learn more about Beautiful Social, explore a partnership, or start a conversation, contact Aimée Knight at aknight@sju.edu.
Our approach to community-led partnership is developed further in Director Aimée Knight’s book, Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change.
About Beautiful Social
What Our Partners Say
“The team really helped demystify the social media space in a way that was easy to understand, and after careful evaluation of our current efforts, provided a strategy that was well thought out and easy to implement, given our budget and resource limitations.”
— Jennifer Riley, Communications Manager at the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House“The group did a great job capturing the goal of the project, that featured a video that provided an overview of the programs we provide for families. I wish we had a few students for an entire semester to be on site.”
— Jeanine Glasgow, Executive Director at the Juvenile Justice Center of Philadelphia “I have nothing but the highest forms of commendation for the students who went above and beyond in their dedication to elevating the visibility and storytelling of former life-sentenced children.”
— Abd’Allah Lateef, Co-Founder of Life After Life