Jessica Bellamy

Internationally recognized data storyteller and grassroots organizer, Jessica Bellamy, wears many hats in her work at the Root Cause Research Center (RCRC). As co-founder, co-principal investigator, and Lead Organizer on Social Housing, Self Governance, and Radical Policy, Bellamy works at the intersections of property and policing to build a multiracial base of poor and working-class tenants in the U.S. South. 

Bellamy grew up in a multigenerational home in Smoketown neighborhood, a poor and working-class Black community in Louisville, Kentucky. In their adulthood they experienced houselessness due to skyrockectng rents, and inevitably experienced indirect displacement from Smoketown due to gentrification. As a result, they use their skills in information design, tenant organizing, and scholarship to build structured tenant-lead campaigns and produce knowledge in solidarity with communities under threat of displacement, surveillance, and police violence. 

As a researcher and organizer, they work alongside tenants and teach them how to investigate the institutions and actors behind the housing crisis, as well as how to build collective power around community needs with their neighbors. Bellamy’s work aims to create sustainable life-affirming housing systems and policies that center the leadership of poor and working-class people. In addition to their role at RCRC, Bellamy is an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union (LTU) and the Historically Black Neighborhood Assembly (a chapter within the Louisville Tenants Union), which are both tenant movements based in Louisville, Kentucky. RCRC and LTU are a part of a national coalition of tenant-led organizations under Homes Guarantee, a People’s Action campaign Together, they aim to eradicate houselessness, de-commodify housing, and make house a human right in the United States. 

Within the design industry, Jessica Bellamy is known as an Adobe Creative Residency alumna and award-winning infographic designer. In 2015, as a former Neurodevelopmental Science research analyst at the University of Louisville and community organizer, Bellamy created a social enterprise that combined grassroots organizing, research, and information graphics. Bellamy named that business GRIDS: The Grassroots Information Design Studio. 

During that time, they developed over 170 projects with tenants and nonprofits prior to co-founding RCRC. That experience deeply shaped Bellamy's approach to conscious and responsible design, a subject they have taught at conferences and at major universities such as Yale, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, Michigan State, and more. Bellamy has been featured in Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, Forbes, Communication Arts Magazine, The Great Discontent, Create Magazine, Creative Mornings, Slack, The Dieline, Revision Path, and on Adobe’s Project 1324 (viewable through Facebook). In 2020, The New York Times’ T Magazine named them one of “The 15 Creative Women for Our Time.” In 2021, Bellamy was named one of Graphic Design USA’s Responsible Designers to Watch. 

Website: www.rootcauseresearch.org

Twiter: @JBellaGraphics 

Instagram: jessicabellamy.design