Rad Fatty Merit Badges started as a lark on my personal Facebook wall and quickly took on a life of its own. I’d sketched a set of tongue-in-cheek, Girl Scout-style merit badges celebrating the small daily acts of courage involved in living unapologetically in a fat body, things like “flew while fat,” “took up space” and “broke chair, don’t care.” (“Rad Fatty” is short for “radicalized fatty,” which I’ve always thought of as a pretty inclusive term: any self-loving fat person, at any stage of that self-love, is radical to me.) People started sharing the sketches and asking how they could get them as stickers and buttons.

So I crowdfunded a small print run, and the response was overwhelming. The campaign finished over 830% funded, turning a handful of drawings into a real product line of pins, stickers and patches. The idea clearly struck a nerve, and the project went on to attract press from an impressive range of outlets, including People, Cosmopolitan, Bustle, Mic, HelloGiggles, A Plus and CafeMom.

What mattered most to me was what happened around the badges. Each one became a prompt for people to share their own stories of how they’d “earned” it, and that storytelling, the swapping of small victories over shame and isolation, was the real point. It’s the same belief that runs through all my work: that personal stories are one of the most powerful tools we have for dismantling stigma. The “flew while fat” badge was part of a much bigger project, my Flying While Fat documentary animation.

If you’re an individual, organisation or campaign working on body positivity, activism or social change and you’d like to bring an idea to life through illustration or design, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.