104 Mildred Ct. 256.656.

7753

Nashville, TN 37211
» WHAT I BELIEVE

Kempten,

I am interested in becoming a part of the editorial team at Green Olive Media

and helping tell the stories of your clients.

I believe in Story. I believe that every person in the world has their own unique
story waiting to be told. More often than not, these stories are hidden within
threads (connecting )running throughout the events and actions of people’s lives
and never get to be told. In the hands of the right person, though, these threads
can be found and woven together to reveal a coherent and meaningful story.
I believe that by extension, any endeavor (professional or otherwise) that a
person believes passionately in becomes an intrinsic part of who they are. To tell
the story of the businesses that people love is to tell the story of those people's
hopes and dreams. I love being given the opportunity to hear of people's lives
and I believe that I have a unique gift for seeing their hidden threads and of
being able to communicate them coherently and eloquently in new and meaning-
ful ways.

I am drawn to Green Olive Media because it is clear that you work with clients
who are not simply making a living but who truly believe in the things they do.
My dream is to work alongside people like that and to share in their passion while
working toward helping them reach their dreams. I also love the South. There is a
richness evident in southern culture that adds a unique color to its people's
stories that can't be found in other parts of the country and it is a huge draw for
me that much of your clientele is based in and around the area.

Most importantly though, I feel that working for Green Olive Media is some-
thing for which I could be passionate about. I would love to find a place as a part
of your team and hopefully provide my talents to communicate the passion that
your clients have for their businesses and to help provide them with an even fuller
and more complete brand as a result.

-Chris Goodson

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
»
 104 Mildred Ct. 256.656.7753

Nashville, TN 37211

August - October 2008 Photoshop

» PROFESSIONAL SKILLS
» EMPLOYMENT

Freelance Writer Illustrator

Relevant Magazine InDesign
Microsoft Word
Worked from Auburn, Alabama
Quark Xpress
Hired as an out-of-office writer to produce feature stories assigned
by the magazine staff to be published in the print magazine.
Other skills
May - August 2008 Photography
Editorial Intern (digital + film)
Relevant Media Group Experienced with
OSX, Windows
Orlando, Florida
and Linux
Conducted research and interviews for various stories for both the print
and online magazine. Copy-edited content submitted by writers.
Wrote stories assigned by the staff for both print and web magazine.

April 2006 – June 2007

Assistant Campus Editor
The Auburn Plainsman
Auburn, Alabama
Thought of and distributed stories to staff writers and editing and
paginating stories upon submission. Took on a 4-to-5 story per week
writing load in order to provide the paper with enough content for publication.

BA of Journalism
» EDUCATION

Minors in English and Psychology

Auburn University
Auburn, Alabama
Graduated: May 2009

chriscgoodson@gmail.com
»
 SCOTT HARRISON Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

Scott Harrison is a hard man to track down. On any given day, one would be just as
likely to find him taking a conference call behind a desk in his SOHO office as they
would of finding him nearly 7000 miles away, digging in the dirt in the arid heat of West
Africa.
But to anyone who knows Harrison, finding him in either place at any time would
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

hardly be considered out of the ordinary. This is because, for the past four years, his life
has been a delicate balancing act between western high-society and third-world poverty.
Although seemingly two separate worlds, both integral parts to the story of his life that
could lead him anywhere in the world at any time.
Unlike other days, though, today is September 7, Harrison’s 33rd birthday, which
means that there can be no doubt as to where to he can be found. The place, an
unorthodox birthday destination, is known as the Abenea school and is located in
highly-impoverished Northern Ethiopia. Here, he is no longer hard to find. Surrounded
by thousands of locals, the light-skinned, salt-and-pepper-haired American looks incred-
ibly conspicuous and out of place. His dirty, wet jeans and T-shirt mark him as unmistak-
ably foreign just as his speech erases all doubt. But Harrison has a story, one that
explains why, despite all appearances, he knows that he is precisely where he needs to
be, doing exactly what he was created to do. And why, here, at a school that is home to
more than 1,400 impoverished students living living in one of the most remote and
poorest places in the world without even the bare necessities of life, he cannot hide the
grin stretching across his face. And, most importantly, this story explains how, under the
scorching sun of this place and others like it - places so dry that even the ground cracks
and breaks from thirst - Scott Harrison has just made it rain.

Water.
Every good story has an over-arching theme. It is what connects the story’s events
and gives meaning to its characters’ lives, making sense of their actions by providing
them with a deeper purpose.
For Harrison, this theme is water.
For the past four years it has been the focal point of his life, running like a stream
directly through its center, touching and influencing nearly everything he has done in
that time. And, just like a river etches canyons from creek beds, slowly but surely it has
cut and shaped him into the man he is today. Mercy.
In the beginning, it was water that carried Harrison away from the life he once knew -
a life where, for a decade, he had run an event company in New York, where he was
payed to plan special events and parties for the city’s social elite the likes of MTV, VH1
and Cosmo. But after spending a third of his life in a state of social climbing and materi-
alism within a world of nightclubs and cocaine, Harrison found himself empty and des-
perately in need of a change. So, seeking both self-discovery and penance to God for a
life thus far misspent, he joined global charity Mercy Ships, a humanitarian organization
that provides free medical services to the poorest areas of the world, as a volunteer
photojournalist aboard one of their hospital ships. Aboard his new home, the 52-year-

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 SCOTT HARRISON Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

old, 550-foot ‘Anastasis’ , he left his life of excess for a cramped, below-deck cabin
bound for the poverty of West Africa’s shores. Aboard the Mercy Ships’ floating hospi-
tals, doctors and surgeons from around the globe are able to reach the most remote of
these regions and provide free treatment for the countless people who otherwise have
no access to even the most basic of medical care. It was in these places that Harrison
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

first encountered the incredible poverty that millions around the globe face as reality.
Through his camera lens, Harrison saw medical cases unimaginable in areas of the world
with access to modern medical care. Every day he saw medical atrocities that Western
medicine had all but eradicated in the rest of the world. He saw men slowly suffocating
from grotesque, disfiguring tumors that had grown to engulf their heads and he saw
children, sad-eyed and hopeless who had been horribly scarred by infections and flesh-
eating bacteria, too ashamed of their own appearance to look him in the face. And
through all of this, he learned that the reason for all of this suffering was tragically
simple: Water.
Although it covers 80% of the world and composes 70% of the human body, there
are over 1.1 billion people - one sixth of the earth’s population - who live without access
to a safe source of water. For who have it, the inability to obtain water is a concept too
foreign to comprehend. Yet for those without, as disease and infection goes unchecked
within their communities, spread by the murky, contaminated water they are forced to
consume just to stay alive, it is an ever-present reality.
"A billion people,” Harrison says, “that’s a big problem. What that actually means is
that millions of people walk hours each day to get water that makes them sick.” This
water lies stagnant in shallow pools often nothing more than glorified puddles, breeding
grounds for parasitic organisms and disease. Because of this, it is estimated that 80% of
all disease in the world is transmitted through unsafe water, a statistic supported by
Harrison’s countless stories.
“You’ve got leaches in water, you have parasites in water, you’ve got water borne
diseases,” he says. “There’s a nasty one called chistosomeiasis which is a nice, fancy
word for worms crawling through your feet or your intestines.”
He has seen ailments, normally considered little more than nuisances, become killers
without water. “Diarrhea is killing millions of kids each year,” Harrison says. “A child will
drink bad water, then get diarrhea and drink more bad water and eventually just die of
dehydration. Something that we would just never even think of being lethal is killing
millions of kids.”
And he’s right. Every week around the globe, 42,000 people, 90% of whom are just
children under the age of five, lose their lives, simply because they lack water and basic
sanitation.
And as thousands a day died and millions of others suffered, Harrison saw them
through tear-blurred lenses, hoping that the images he captured would give a voice to
and effect a change for he people he saw quietly dying below the radar of the rest of the
world. Charity.
So, when the time came for Harrison to return home from Mercy Ships, he knew that

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 SCOTT HARRISON Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine
he couldn’t forget what he had seen, what he now knew, and go back to his old life.
To him, the next step was obvious. “The more I learned about the global water crisis,
there was really nothing more pressing that affected the global poor,” he says. “Decid-
ing after my two-year-stint volunteering with mercy ships that I wanted to throw the rest
of my life at this, water was sort of the only place to start.”
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

So, with the conditions in water-less communities still fresh in his mind’s eye, Harrison
decided to find a way to provide it. The result: out of his SOHO apartment, he founded
Charity: Water, a non-profit organization dedicated to solving the global water problem
at its source, by drilling life-giving wells inside of the communities. “It’s sort of related
to the work on Mercy Ships,” Harrison says. “They were doing a lot of after-care, but by
giving people clean water we can perhaps prevent some of these diseases in the first
place.”
With his two years of raising support for Mercy Ships serving as guidelines, Harrison
founded Charity: Water using elements that he had already seen work.
Because of this, one of Charity’s main goals is to provide a link between donors and the
work being done through their donations. “Charity was sort of born out that,” Harrison
says. “We said, ‘Every time we start a water project lets take a GPS coordinate, put it up
on Google Earth and take a picture of the community so people can see exactly where
the money went.’” Similarly,
With little more than these simple guidelines and a fresh remembrance of untold
suffering, Harrison held the official launch for Charity: Water on September 7, 2006, his
31st birthday. The event, which was as much a birthday party as it was launch party, was
incredibly successful.
“That was our start,” he says. “700 friends came and everyone tossed $20 dollars in
for a bottle of water. We raised $15,000 dollars and we built 3 wells and fixed three wells
in southern Uganda.”
And from there, there was no turning back. With Harrison’s vast social connections
fueled by his powerful blend of charisma and passion for those in need, Charity was able
to OTHER FUNDRAISERS September. Charity’s most successful campaign, however,
has been around since day one. Called Born in September, this annual campaign
began as a modified version of the organization’s launch party to mark the first anniver-
sary of Charity: Water.
“We said, ‘Let’s not throw another party for our one year anniversary,’” Harrison says,
“‘let’s actually send out invitations to not attend a party and ask everyone to stay home
and just send in a little bit of money. I was turning 32, so we said, let’s ask everybody for
$32.” And that was all it took. Ninety others quickly followed his lead, giving up their
birthdays in lieu of donations to Charity. By the campaign’s completion, $150,000 had
been raised, 10 times the amount from the previous year, which Charity used to dig wells
for three hospitals and one school in Kenya, showing donors their progress through
videos uploaded nightly to their website .
This year, they’re going even bigger. It started in April, when Harrison visited 33
waterless communities throughout Ethiopia, creating and posting short film of each to

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 SCOTT HARRISON Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

Charity’s website. The films, made to give the public a more intimate look at the cam-
paign, represented the first 33 communities scheduled to receive wells from the cam-
paign. His hope is, after completion of the first 33 wells, to continue building until reach-
ing their goal of 333 wells from this year’s campaign. “The goal of the [2008] Septem-
ber campaign is to build 333 wells in Ethiopia. To do that, we need $1.5 million,” Harri-
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

son says. “So this year we said ‘Hey, let’s try and do 10 times what we did last year. If 90
people could raise this money, what about 900 people? could we do 10 times that?’”

Hope.
Knowing the story of Scott Harrison’s life, that is a question requires no answer.
He has already answered it himself many times, in stories just like this one on this day in
Abenea.
He is still standing in the sun, the smile still betraying his excitement for the day, as
tiny water droplets fall behind him, turning the surrounding earth to mud. Each cool,
clean drop is the precursor to countless gallons that will follow to provide potable water
that this community so desperately needs, the well itself serving as the first proof of this
year’s September campaign.
And all of these things serve to answer Harrison’s question.
All of it: the mud, the smile, the water, the well; they are all signs of the progress that
he has made in the last four years, reminders of the lives that have been changed and,
more importantly, those who haven’t.
Of course he believes that ten times more could be raised, he’s seen it happen too
many times before not to. And so, he will keep moving all over the planet, flowing like
the water that is so central to his life, until there is no longer a need for him to do so.

AT THE TIME OF THIS PUBLICATION, Charity:WATER HAD RECEIVED $408,000 IN

MATCHING FUNDS ($816,000 TOTAL I THINK), HAVING RAISED OVER $6 MILLION
SINCE THEY WERE FOUNDED, WITH OVER 800 PROJECTS GOING IN 6 COUNTRIES.

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 A WAVERLY STORY
Inside Conrad Carpenter’s house, a fresh breeze blows through an old screen door,
preventing the insects of a warm South Alabama afternoon from joining the festivities
inside. They are not needed tonight; the air inside is already abuzz, full of the sights,
smells and sounds of laughter and cooking. Jazz music emanates from a radio in the
kitchen where Carpenter’s friends each have a role in preparing for the night’s chili:
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

chopping green peppers, searing meat, washing, talking, drinking, each task equally
important in its own way. These are friends and neighbors, joined together for no special
reason other than to be with one another. Just as the meat is ready to go in to the pot,
three young boys bearing plastic fire arms burst from the back of the house and chase
each other through the front door out into the cool early evening of their neighborhood.
This is Waverly. With a population hovering just below 200 residents, it rests in the
bottom ten percent of cities in Alabama. Founded sometime around 1830 as Pea Ridge
and becoming the incorporated town of Waverly in 1910, it has rarely seen times when
its population has drastically exceeded this. Its size, 2.7 square miles, has been
preserved over the years due to the strong hedging of tree farms owned by longtime
residents who have refused to sell. From the 1950’s, the town was host to old U.S. High-
way 280, a two lane stretch of tarmac jutting East from of Birmingham. Finally, in 2000, a
bypass was completed which diverted the highway back out of town, leaving Waverly as
a sleepy little town once again. According to native Willie Mae Mcdonald, a lifetime
resident and one of its oldest at 85, Waverly is a very special town. “There ain’t never
real bad people in Waverly. Everybody used to hunt and fish together and whatever. We
just be neighbors to each other and good to each other, that’s all we want.”Willie Mae
Old School Waverly is a modern day Mayberry, iconic small town America. It is the kind
of town where people grow their own vegetables in neatly seeded rows in their front
yards. The kind of town where people still sit on old southern front-porches enjoy the
cool night air under countless stars, untainted by light pollution from big cities.
The kind of town where houses are just a little bit too close to a road that was con-
structed when the only traffic involved moving through had four legs.
And Waverly is the kind of town where the cemetery is still located, both geographically
and personally, to most of the residents’ lives; a celebration of a proud town heritage
where the names etched deep into to the headstones can still be found painted on to
the sides of mailboxes throughout town because the bloodlines memorialized there still
flow strong in the veins the of residents. It is exactly the type of place where you would
expect to meet a man like Marcus Moremon.
Upon first impression, Marcus Moremon is an imposing man. His powerful voice
emanates purposefully from deep within the tall, broad frame that he holds startlingly
straight and easily for his 80 years. Preceding even his physical stature, Moremon’s
namesake bears a heritage deeply and proudly rooted in Waverly. His family was one of
the first to move to town, arriving in 1845. His Father and Grandfather both established
themselves by owning their own stores in Waverly. Perhaps more impressive here, there
are 9 Moremons resting in the local Cemetery, securing him firmly in the lineage of this
town.

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 A WAVERLY STORY
A resident of Waverly his entire life, Moreman entered the Army at the age of 16, serving
for two years before Auburn University. He was called back into service in 1950 for the
Korean War, this time serving for 26 years before serving for 20 more years as a comman-
dant at Lyman Ward Military Academy. He then moved back to Waverly where he was
Mayor from 1990 until 1999. According to Willie Mae McDonald, an 85-year-old lifelong
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

resident, Moremon is something of a champion for the town and its people.
“It don’t matter what comes up, if it’s good or bad, he keeps pickin’ at it, he wants to get
it goin’ right,” she says. “If I called Marcus he’d be right here, if I needed to go some-
where, he’d take me. Marcus always stood by our family soon as anybody else that I
know of. I tell ‘em all, I say if Marcus wasn’t here to help do these things and get em
going, nobody wouldn’t do nothin’. He’s a good man. He may roar a little bit but that
don’t matter nothin’”
New School
Despite being a haven of so many old-world charms, Waverly is also home to a lot of
diversity. The kind of town where in the early afternoon you can find a 65-year-old
bearded man plowing the garden surrounding his home, sitting shirtless on an old
tractor, sipping on a beer while discussing the conflict in the Middle East and quoting
Yeats.
The kind of town where if you call either Waverly Town Hall or the Waverly Diet Center
The kind of town where graphic design professors from nearby Auburn University move
to raise their families and open studios from which to practice their craft. And it is the
kind of town where you would find someone like Scott Peek.
Just down the road from Moremon’s, Peek’s building is unmistakable. Its outside walls
are adorned with an assortment of signs of every color imaginable, making it noticeably
more eclectic than the other buildings on the road through town. The largest of these
signs, placed in a prominent position in front, reads, “Real Southern Vernacular Post-
modern Eclectic Screen Printing.” This is the Standard Deluxe silkscreen and print shop
owned and operated by Peek for a decade from right here in Waverly. Despite this and
though he has lived in Waverly since the fall of 1991, Peek is still very much considered a
newcomer to town in comparison to others. Although his building is located directly
across the street from the cemetery, Peek’s only link to it is a string of orange and yellow
flags stretching from his into the graveyard, a connection not held in high regard by the
locals. He moved here directly after graduating from nearby Auburn University with a
degree in Graphic design whereupon he opened the Standard Deluxe with two part-
ners. Since then he has gone solo and built the business to national acclaim, attracting a
loyal following as well as many ties with Auburn’s graphic design program.
Peek’s love for art also extends beyond the realm of design through a passion for local
and regional music. He does his best to support these bands by bringing them to town
to perform at parties that he throws throughout the year.
As a result his influence, the artistic community in Waverly has seen a lot of growth
during his time living here.
“I think Scott Peek probably had a lot of influence on me moving here,” says Andy

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 A WAVERLY STORY
Anderson the Vice President of Wickle’s Pickles and resident of Waverly. “I didn’t even
really know him until about the time I started working here but just the cool artsy culture
of the town for the size town it is intrigued me.”
Change
The truly unique thing about Waverly is how, for years, it was a place of harmony
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

between these very different groups of people. Old and new coexisted in community in
a quiet little town that held refuge for both artists and the locals whose families had
been there since its foundation. But recently things have begun to change. Growing
tension between Peek and the landlord from whom he was renting the buildings he ran
the Standard Deluxe out of led Scott to move his business down the road, toward his
own home and into another house that he had been remodeling and had recently pur-
chased. However, due to zoning regulations in Waverly, the house and the land it occu-
pied were zoned historic residential, prohibiting a business from being operated there.
On August 21, 2008, Peek and Carolyn Stubbs, a life-long resident of Waverly, filed an
application to have seven buildings, including his, rezoned from historic residential to
central historic so that business could be run out of them. On September 29, 2008, the
Town of Waverly Planning Commission met about the zoning and sent a positive recom-
mendation for approval to the Town Council, a move that normally results in the City
Council also approving the rezone. However, when the Town Council finally met in
November, they received dozens of letters written by citizens expressing their concerns
about the rezoning.
The majority, like David and Kyla Garner’s, focused their attention on the parties that
Peek had been having on his property. “Over the past few years we have been disap-
pointed about the path we have seen Waverly heading down,” They said. “Our biggest
concern are the parties that are happening in town,” referring to the parties thrown by
Peek at the Standard Deluxe.” After reviewing letter after letter expressing concern for
the parties held at the Standard Deluxe and their effects on the community, the City
Council sent the rezoning matter back to the Planning Commission where its original
decision was reversed. With this decision, at the next City Council meeting, without any
public hearing, the rezoning application was formally denied in a majority vote. So, as a
result, Peek and Stubbs filed a lawsuit suing the City Council, including Marcus More-
mon. Under counsel from legal advisors, all parties involved in the suit were unwilling to
speak about the case.
And now, this town that used to live in simple harmony is divided against itself, each
side fighting for its own version of Waverly. The older set wants to maintain the quiet,
peaceful town of their childhoods that they carry with them, forever persevered in their
minds. For the old fighter Moremon, this means one thing, and he does not seem intent
on backing down from what he believes. “I think most people want to keep it a nice
quiet, peaceful safe town,” he says. “Most all the people I know kind of like it the way it
is with its small-town atmosphere. It’s a quiet town safe town, a peaceful town, and a
good place to raise kids and I hope it stays that way.” Mcdonald feels the same way. She
loves her home and wants to see it survive, even after she is gone. “It used to be every-

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 A WAVERLY STORY
one wanted to make a livin’, there wasn’t nothing like this sittin’ down work,” she said.
“Everybody was friends, we never had a lot of fighting, we had a few drunks once in a
while but not always but it’s been a nice quiet town and that’s the way we want to keep
it.”
On the other side, Peek is fighting a battle for his livelihood, trying to operate the busi-
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

ness that he loves in the place he calls home. “The whole thing for me is to sell T-shirts
and posters,” said Peek. “I don’t think we’re hurting anyone doing that. I love this town,
but this is my business and they’re trying to take that away from me.” Mace Glasscock, a
local farmer and carpenter, has been a Waverly resident for over thirty years. No longer
considered a transplant yet still not a true local, he is able to look at the situation from
somewhere outside. “You’ve got an old crowd that’s very entrenched that feel like they
are Waverly and that anybody that’s a transplant is not,” he said, “and to a certain
extent, they’re right. Small towns are all about whose names are already in the grave-
yard. Scott is the new wave, and I guess in some people’s minds, he still represents The
Hippies... They’re still fighting the battle with the 60’s in their minds. The problem is this
isn’t the 60’s anymore” For now, neither side has a clear edge over the other; both
parties are locked in a stalemate trying to save the town they love. Everyone is confident
that this will someday end, they have somehow missed along the way that they’re all
fighting for the same thing. “I mean, it’s a Mayberry,” summarized Carpenter. “So I can
understand that conservative side to keep it a Mayberry. But what they don’t realize is
that a lot of these people, the same reason some of those artists and hippies and so
forth moved out there was for the same reasons. They don’t want to change that, they
want to keep that too. A lot of people are on the same page and they’re fighting and
they don’t understand that they’re on the same page.” The Future
In Conrad’s house, the chili is now simmering on the stove while music still plays from
the small kitchen stereo. Now, however, the notes have to fight through a growing
cacophony coming from the back yard. The back yard is an eclectic collection of various
tools and colorful objects collected around an large white van and an old wooden shed,
both of which Carpenter works from at different times. The sound is coming from a
covered porch connected the back of the house where a tired and weather-worn piano
is surrounded by the neighborhood boys from earlier, reigned in from
running through the neighborhood to focus on their current venture. One sits at the
bench, hammering the ivory keys while another stands back, blowing random notes from
the shiny old trumpet in his hand as the third simply watches and grins. Extending a
Coors to me in offering, Carpenter nods in their direction and smiles. “Have you met the
boys yet?” he asks. “This the Waverly Gang. They’re the future of this place.”
And from innocent joy on their faces, it is clear why everyone, young and old, is confi-
dent that whatever conflict has arisen will someday reside. It has to. They are, inevitably,
the future of this town and it is apparent that they love it. “To me, one of the main
reasons I stayed out there is that I want my son to know what it’s like to walk up and
down the street, maybe even with a BB gun in his hand without someone calling the
cops or someone getting upset,” Carpenter said. “Just knowing that there’s a lot of

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 A WAVERLY STORY
eyeballs on him in town and I know that they’re going to be ok and I don’t have to
worry.”
» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

CHRISCGOODSON@GMAIL.COM
 » PORTFOLIO: PHOTOGRAPHY

chriscgoodson@gmail.com
»
 » PORTFOLIO: PHOTOGRAPHY

chriscgoodson@gmail.com
»