What the Orange Box Did for UNICEF

How can one physical object change the way people think, behave, or participate?

Credit: Robert Oberkehr, posted to Facebook, New Jersey and New York Nostalgia

It was with unbridled excitement that I took the bright orange and black UNICEF box home from school one fall day in the 1970s. I had received it flat so it had to be constructed, and I wanted to do it myself even though my older brother intervened a bit. Maybe it was the printer in me already, but the item was so appealing that collecting for charity was suddenly exciting to me.

I remember tearing one of the tabs this first year. I was five, and in such a hurry to put it together that I forced it. Later I repaired it with Scotch tape. I wanted it to be perfect. The box had arrived in the same season as leaves were ironed between sheets of wax-paper, turkeys were cut out after tracing little hands, and orange pumpkins taped to classroom windows. It belonged to the world of fall making.

Credit: Penny Hedlund, posted to Facebook, We Pretend It's Still the 1970s

Before it held a single coin, it had already become part of the ritual of Halloween. For one evening, we weren't just children in costumes. We had a job. Adults dropped pennies into our little orange boxes because they trusted us to carry them safely back to school. But the box had already done its job long before this night: we had built it, admired it, imagined filling it.

A 1955 report summarized the success of this campaign when it was brand new, in both numbers and culturally,

The United States Committee for UNICEF has issued an attractive orange-and-black folder with material promoting its Hallowe’en program of “Trick or Treat” for UNICEF. This program initiated in 1952 [sic], has spread rapidly: the number of states participating increased from 30 in 1952 to 48 in 1955, the number of communities from 484 to 4,000 and the money collected from $32,000 to $273,000.

The Value of the program lies less in the funds it provides for UNICEF, although each dollar goes a long way there, than in the substitution of a constructive for a destructive use of the Hallowe’en festival and in the opportunity it affords to interest American children of less fortunate countries.[i]

Mary Emma Allison, a Philadelphia librarian, is known to have been the genius behind the creation of the UNICEF Trick-or Treat collection box that children carried for decades on the Halloween nights of our childhoods. Allison found the inspiration during a 1949 visit to Wannamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia, where she saw a UNICEF collection booth to send powdered milk to underfed children overseas and got an idea, According to her 2010 obituary in the New York Times,

Mrs. Allison wrote an appeal for a national magazine her husband edited, which was sent to Presbyterian Sunday school teachers. Published before Halloween in 1950, the appeal asked prospective trick-or-treaters to collect coins for Unicef in milk cartons or tins. There is no accurate record of the takings that first year, but Unicef’s orange cardboard box with the coin slot, which soon supplanted the milk cartons, became a ubiquitous presence in the sticky hands of autumn.[ii]

Mary Emma Allison with her three children, 1954, photograph, courtesy of the Allison Family, reproduced in Margalit Fox, "Mary Emma Allison, Who Inspired Charitable Ghouls, Dies at 93," New York Times, October 29, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30allison.html.

Today's nonprofit organizations are still asking the same question Mary Emma Allison asked more than seventy years ago: How do you inspire ordinary people to participate? Looking back after 3 decades of printing countless items, I think the little orange box offers a clear answer. It reminds us that a thoughtfully designed printed object placed into the right hands, can do much more than communicate information. It can recruit people into action.

I've spent my career in printing and I realize I was captivated by this object long before I understood why. It wasn't simply collecting money. It encouraged children to participate with a large degree of agency. It transformed us from spectators into helpers. It made a small child feel important. The little orange box didn't ask children to save the world. It asked us to take part in it. Looking back, that may have been its greatest lesson. Good printed objects don't simply carry information. They invite participation. They make us feel that our small contribution matters, whether it's a handful of pennies in a UNICEF box, five dollars in a church collection plate, or a membership renewal sent to a local museum. The amount is only part of the story. The act of participating is what builds communities, and strengthens a democracy. Learn more here.

Mary Emma Allison is correctly remembered and acknowledged because she had an idea to engage children in a fight against global hunger. But I can’t help but wonder: Who was the designer, the die-cutter, and printer who turned this great idea into one of the most memorable printed objects of twentieth-century childhood? I hope one day to learn their names. But in the meanwhile, I want to say how incredible the execution of this object was and what it meant to generations of grade school children who would feel important when they were entrusted with their orange box.

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NOTES

[i] Trick or Treat for UNICEF.” Social Service Review 29, no. 3 (1955): 296–296. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30019488.

[ii] Margalit Fox, "Mary Emma Allison, Who Inspired Charitable Ghouls, Dies at 93," New York Times, October 29, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30allison.html.

SOURCES

Fox, Margalit. "Mary Emma Allison, Who Inspired Charitable Ghouls, Dies at 93." New York Times. October 29, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30allison.html.

“Trick or Treat for UNICEF.” Social Service Review 29, no. 3 (1955): 296–296.