Portland State Magazine Spring 2018

30 ALUMNUS Branden Harvey is a really optimistic person, but at the end of 2016 even he was overwhelmed with despair. The news was full of stories about the fallout from a divisive presidential election, the growing refugee crisis, and terrorism, conflict and injustice around the world. Bad news. So, he decided to spread more good news. Harvey, who majored in advertising and marketing at Portland State, launched a newspaper devoted to telling stories about the good in the world. He was inspired by a quote from the late Mister Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” “It’s not that I wanted to pretend that there’s not injustice in the world, or that everything was fine,” Harvey says. “I just thought, ‘What can I do to encourage people to look for the helpers and give them the tools to become the helpers themselves?’” Harvey, who is 25, started telling stories through photos as a teenager in Pullman, Washington. By the time he was a junior at Portland State in 2013, he had a successful photography business, thousands of social media followers and national brands eager to hire him. He traveled the world taking photos on assignment, from Eastern Oregon to Southeast Asia and Uganda, directly applying what he was learning in his marketing and advertising classes to his business. Since then, he has been featured in national media outlets such as Fortune, Mashable, and Esquire . His company, Good Good Good, published the first quarterly “Goodnewspaper” in 2017 with more than $55,000 in Kickstarter donations, along with a podcast, “Sounds Good with Branden Harvey.” Both can be found on his website www.goodgoodgood.co . “Ultimately what we want to do is inspire action,” he says. “We really want people to put the newspaper down and find a way to get involved.” –written by Suzanne Pardington, a Portland freelance writer. POSITIVE Promoting the ALUMNI