“Teddy Bear Sit-in” jolts Chicago into awareness about a crisis.

The Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center provides sensitive and responsive care for thousands of victims of child sexual abuse each year. But they can’t help the estimated 3,000 children in the Chicago area that remain silent about the abuse they endure every year.

We took over Daley Plaza to create a dramatic, large-scale “Teddy Bear Sit-in” with 3,000 stuffed animals, each one representing an individual case of sexual abuse that went unreported. This astonishing metaphor for unpunished crimes and innocence lost forever provoked a range of powerful emotions from Chicagoans, and received major media coverage from every news entity in Chicago, and caught the attention of the world when many thousands of witnesses to the event shared images of their experience of it on social media.