Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, rainbow lawn signs inscribed with a heart and the message “All Are Welcome Here” began blanketing neighborhoods in Minnesota.
“It is snowing, the lawns are frozen,” recalled Jaime Chismar, 48, the St. Louis Park-based freelance graphic designer behind the signs. “There is nowhere to put a lawn sign. [But] we sold a ton.”
The inclusive message seemed like a rallying cry of the moment. In response to the divisive rhetoric of then first-term President Donald Trump, a swell of local Democratic activism across the country pushed back.
But almost a decade later, with Trump once again back in office, it’s a different kind of moment.
Democrats are divided and voters are exhausted. Several weeks into Trump’s second term, there doesn’t seem to be a new rallying cry. Meanwhile, All Are Welcome Here, Chismar’s graphic design project that grew out of those initial lawn signs, is going on hiatus.
“There’s [another unifying message] out there, and I don’t think we know what it is yet,” Chismar said. “People are really tired…we have to wait and see, and rest and educate ourselves.”
Since 2016, the project created around 15,000 lawn signs, and donated part of its proceeds. Roughly $120,000 has gone to over 100 organizations.
Most of that support went to the legal group ACLU of Minnesota and Transforming Families Minnesota, an organization helping transgender and gender nonconforming kids.
The hiatus is for part of 2025, but Chismar doesn’t have a concrete timeline for bringing All Are Welcome Here back.
All physical merchandise is sold out. Soon, the only offering will be paid digital downloads with the “All Are Welcome Here” graphic translated into over 60 languages. One recent example showcases how the digital download can be used: Someone put up a sign that says “All Are Welcome Here (Except Fascists).”
The sunsetting may not be a sign of the times — the project had been weighing on Chismar for years. At its heart was a kind of clash of business and progressive values that made the project unsustainable.
But in a way, the story of All Are Welcome Here traces how the progressive messaging of 2016 rose up and sputtered down. Perhaps it also offers a lesson to whatever comes next, in Minnesota or elsewhere.
Then again, in an age of widespread cynicism about activism, it can be hard to believe in the power of a lawn sign.
“With a lawn sign, I think at its worst, it’s performative allyship, but at its best, it can show people you’re not alone, and it can motivate people” to fight for change, Chismar said.
At the same time, “I think about my kiddo, who’s 13, and I wonder if they’re going to have less rights than I do,” she said. “I don’t think a lawn sign can fix [that]. I think the values behind the lawn sign can do it. But I don’t think a lawn sign in itself is an answer.”
The origin
When Chismar initially designed the All Are Welcome Here signs, she was inspired by the response to racist graffiti at Maple Grove High School, found just days after the 2016 election.
Students welcomed each other to the high school with positivity and posted messages about love and belonging.
“I sat down at my desk and I started designing a sign in Photoshop,” Chismar said. “I knew it needed to have a heart, kind of an emoji part of it, and I knew it needed to have a typeface that was very welcoming, and I threw a rainbow on it.”
After crowdsourcing the design with friends, Chismar had the final graphic. She anticipated a run of about 50 yard signs for St. Louis Park — but then came a deluge of broader interest.
In a few days, All Are Welcome Here had a website for pre-orders, and Chismar was getting set up to sell lawn signs at the Minneapolis Craft Market.
Eventually, the lawn sign graphic found its way onto a variety of merchandise, including T-shirts, buttons, stickers and window cling. Chismar continued to sell products online and at local events, while also making custom designs for organizations across the country.
“We had a pediatric cardiologist who asked us for a bunch of Spanish pins because she was seeing a lot of kids…and she wanted a little pin to show them that they were safe in her office — they weren’t going to call ICE,” Chismar said. “It seems like every custom order has its own really interesting backstory.”
Not built for “Shark Tank”
From the beginning, Chismar ran into the tension that can come with trying to sustainably run a business with progressive values.
The first weak point was inescapable: Printing a rainbow graphic is more expensive because of the multiple colors used.
But other decisions also raised the cost of producing merch and cut into profit margins. To give back to the community, Chismar decided to work with Twin Cities print companies, and to donate part of the proceeds from the merchandise to local organizations.
“If it costs $15 to produce a T-shirt and you’re selling it at a Pride festival for $30, you’re paying people in your booth…you’re paying for your [participation] fee, and then you’re giving a [donation],” Chismar said. “It’s just not sustainable.”
Then came the basic economics of selling lawn signs online. The cost of signs, stakes, printing, packaging and shipping all add up. Because of that, at first, Chismar only sold lawn signs online in packs of five.
Later, she managed to sell the signs in a pack of two for roughly $45-$50. But even then the value proposition seemed strange, and charging more for sustainability felt out of the question.
“There is a limit to how much someone can and should pay for a lawn sign,” Chismar said. “It’s not a consumable good like chocolate. You eat all your chocolate and then you want more chocolate. But for a lawn sign, depending upon where you store it, you might want one, and it could last for 10 years.”
Custom graphic design work, despite sounding lucrative, also didn’t help sustainability. Not many clients had a large budget to spend.
For a small nonprofit with few resources, “you can’t charge your official fancy pants designer hourly rate,” Chismar said.
Deceptively, the same was true of many corporate clients. Often, it was a company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative reaching out for custom work, and they had limited budgets.
In the effort to stay on top of the business, there was little time to figure out sustainability.
“I always thought about what would happen to me if I went on ‘Shark Tank,’” Chismar said.
“Barbara and Lori would want to give me a hug, but they wouldn’t give me a deal. And I think Mr. Wonderful would just laugh me right out of there,” she said.
“Mark Cuban would be like, ‘You’re a hot mess. These numbers don’t make any sense. I could go make my own lawn sign and get it…for $2 [per piece in bulk] from China.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but then you would have a basement full of 10,000 lawn signs.’”
The arc of relevance
By 2019, Chismar already felt like it was time to sunset All Are Welcome Here. People who wanted them already had bought a lawn sign (or two or five), and there was not much else to do.
But then came the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, and interest surged again. Still, as time went on, it felt like All Are Welcome Here’s relevance was slipping.
A message that once seemed fresh had been co-opted by just about everyone. Sometimes other artists would use the rainbow graphic without paying for it, or just reuse the words. But most egregious is the flurry of cheap copycat designs that are now easily found on sites like Amazon.
Chismar tested out other messages, like a shimmery metallic print of the phrase “The world is better with you in it” for a 5k run to support suicide prevention.
“I put it in the booth one day…and that print outsold all of our other prints,” Chismar said. “I was like, I think the community might be ready for another message.”
But maybe the next message doesn’t need to come from Chismar — something social media’s shift to vertical video drove home for her. Video means making a face and a name much more central to the project.
“As someone who presents as a white, cis woman from an inner ring suburb, I can’t make All Are Welcome Here about me,” she said. “There’s a lot of people doing beautiful work out there. Maybe it’s time for me to step back so other work can be honored.”
So in the fall, after years of burnout, Chismar announced that All Are Welcome Here would be sunsetting after the 2024 election. The announcement prompted an outpouring of support online.
“Whenever I’ve seen one of your signs or stickers at the entrance of a business, I can relax inside,” said one Instagram commenter.
“I just feel like the world needs your signs,” said another. “They make me smile every time I see them. They let the underdogs know they are seen and welcomed.”
Chismar hasn’t ruled out doing a limited run of physical merch at some point, or even restarting All Are Welcome Here in another form — perhaps with some help. In the meantime, she’s continuing freelance graphic design work and teaching about graphic design in schools.
But Chismar needs the rest, and the time to reflect on how the project can come back in a way that doesn’t leave her exhausted.
“Never say never,” she said. “Or maybe the reality of the situation is, I took it as far as it can go, and there’s some awesome organization out there that wants to pick up the ball and run with it.”
The post As Trump’s second act begins, a Minnesota symbol of inclusivity takes a break appeared first on MinnPost.
