Giving Compass' Take:

• Fast Company reports on a pro bono ad campaign known as The Humanium Metal Initiative in which guns are smelted into steel bars and made into design products. Proceeds from sales of this "Humanium" go to local organizations fighting poverty and violence from the areas where the guns were sourced (El Salvador and Guatemala).

• This seems like a clever way to raise more awareness about gun violence in other nations, although it remains to be seen whether it will have an impact on policymaking. Would U.S. Humanium grab more attention?

• To make a difference in the gun control debate, we must also treat it as a public health issue. Here's how.

What if every time the police confiscated guns, those weapons were melted down and remade into something that benefited the people and communities who had been hurt by gun violence? That’s the premise of The Humanium Metal Initiative, a pro bono campaign from Stockholm creative agencies Great Works and Akestam Holst, which devised a business development strategy to brand melted down guns as a new precious metal. The project, which is now making metal from guns in central America, is the winner of the advertising category of Fast Company‘s 2018 World Changing Ideas Awards.

The ad for the program shows a new assembly line in progress: You see government authorities collecting guns and sending them to a foundry where they’re deconstructed and smelted into steel bars stamped with an invented periodic symbol that reads “Hu” for Humanium. The goal is to show how Humanium is “the world’s most valuable metal,” says Johan Pihl, a creative director at Great Works.  “That is based on the metal’s capacity to help heal the wounds from illegal firearms in developing countries.”

To do so, the two ad companies coordinated with IM Swedish Development Partner, a nonprofit agency, to ensure that the weapon repurposing effort was publicly traceable and that all proceeds would go back to local partner organizations battling poverty and violence in the areas where the weapons came from. The commercial ends with a set of celebrity endorsements, from the Dalai Lama, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, and Desmond Tutu.

Read the full article about Humanium, the ad idea to help stop gun violence, by Ben Paynter at fastcompany.com.