Serving New York’s Homeless & Hungry For Over 150 Years: The Bowery Mission Story

For over 150 years now, The Bowery Mission (through all of its history, iterations, and growth) has been a place for hope, healing, support, and togetherness for people in New York City facing homelessness.This faith-driven organization, founded in a city we love, has a rich history that has not only survived but thrived. And, how?Behind this historic nonprofit is a support network of compassionate people and partner organizations who are dedicated to connecting struggling neighbors to necessary resources.

Read the highlights below from our November 2022 Inside Look webinar featuring Brian Ourien, The Bowery Mission’s Director of Brand Marketing and Communications to learn more about how impactful storytelling generates ongoing crucial support, or skip to the end of this article to watch the session on-demand now.

The Bowery Mission Story

The Bowery Mission’s origin story starts with its founders: Jerry and Maria McAuley, a married couple that founded what became the nation’s first rescue mission.

“The mission — which would later be known as McAuley Water Street Mission (1879), and New York City Rescue Mission (2000) — became legendary for its provisions and prayer meetings. Every person in need was given a sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a helping hand.”

From the beginning, the organization’s lifelong mission was not only to advocate but to also provide service the less fortunate. Thus, “radical hospitality” and compassionate care quickly became their foundational practices.

Archiving 150 Years of Transformative Work

We’re proud to play a role in this team’s storytelling process. With PhotoShelter for Brands, The Bowery Mission storing, organizing, and accessing their archive of over 60,000 historical photos and memories is seamless.

The marketing and communications teams can search through galleries of content and find exactly what they need for an event, project, or campaign using precise keywording. Plus, sharing content with their partners or anyone who needs access to the content is a simple click away.

“We planned this for an entrie year, so that required meticulous archiving of all sorts of assets. We have more than 60,000 assets in our Library dating from the 1870s up to today, so for this huge task PhotoShelter was quite invaluable to us in how we categorized everything…Finding pictures and videos from history was pretty easy…We work with external agencies like the company that helped us publish the book, and the production agency that we’re still working with, so the seamlessness makes it easy to collaborate both internally and externally especially on the contemporary work that we’re doing now–for one-off campaigns, whether it’s on social media or out-of-home advertising. We’re working with LinkNYC for those who are familiar, they have about 2,000 advertising kiosks around the city, so PhotoShelter helps us manage us those kinds of projects.”

Brian Ourien

5 Successful Nonprofit Marketing Campaign Tactics for Celebrating Transformative Work

1. Storytelling: On their website, they have a powerful and creative section on their website dedicated to the inspiring stories of the many lives transformed through the Mission.Brian explains in the webinar how these transformative stories inspired the anniversary campaign:
   “What is the meaning of someone’s story? When one person’s life is transformed, the power that they have to affect change and influence others is quite enormous…so this was a way for us to look back at the history of The Bowery Mission and celebrate those stories from many years ago. To connect that to the current day we looked at interesting ways to tell these stories because they’re deep. As many of us know, homelessness is a difficult issue to talk about because what is homelessness? What causes homelessness? Homelessness looks very different for different people…There’s some kind of anonymity with homelessness…You can’t tell by looking at someone and yet deep down, people are dealing with all sorts of struggles…so we came up with this idea of silhouettes that just captures a facelessness to homelessness. There’s a story behind every silhouette, every face, every facade has a depth to it that once you dive into it has a lot of promise.”
2. Museum Exhibit: They created a museum-quality exhibit that showcased a timeline of events since the 1870s and contextualized the history of The Bowery Mission for supporters, community members, and new visitors. The exhibit was unveiled during their anniversary gala A Legacy Transformation in October 2022 but then relocated to a pop-up gallery location for the month of December. It is now closed, but some of the artwork still remains on display in multiple locations throughout NYC.
3. Gala Event: A Legacy Transformation was held in a neighboring historic building which was once the Bowery Savings Bank. Watch this news package clip from PIX11 for a glimpse into the historic night.
4. Commemorative Book: To preserve the stories they’ve gathered over the past 150 years into a tangible takeaway, they also published a book. A luxury publishing company in London reached out to Brian and his team with interest in helping them create something to celebrate their upcoming anniversary, and the beautiful book pictured below was the result.
5. Social Media: Check out The Bowery Mission’s content honoring their historic anniversary on Instagram and Twitter.

Meet the Speaker

Brian Ourien is a marketing and communications strategist with experience in non-profit and corporate market positioning. His expertise is in journalism, documentary photography, media management, corporate communications, and public relations. Prior to joining The Bowery Mission, Brian held communications and marketing roles in several industries including news media, international non-profit, tourism, real estate, and higher education.

Watch The Webinar

After learning more about his time with The Bowery Mission, it’s incredible to see the far-reaching impact of his team’s work, and the clear passion he has for lifting up New Yorkers in need.

If we choose to practice community care consistently, the season of giving could last all year long! For the brand marketers, creatives, and communicators that work for and support nonprofits like The Bowery Mission, this is the message they’ve been championing for 150 years.

To support this incredible organization, the teams who work tirelessly on-site and behind the scenes, and the New Yorkers who rely on The Bowery Mission, consider donating here.