HIWI
HOUSTON IT'S WORTH IT

Houston. It’s Worth It happened organically in the summer of 2004. We were sitting around discussing why we love Houston, and why the city has a bad rep, and one of us came up with the phrase “Houston. It’s Worth It.” We put up a website where other Houstonians could express their love for the city in their own words. The website continues to provide opportunities for Houstonians to voice their passion for a city that’s so routinely misunderstood by outsiders.

In the initial phase of the campaign, visitors to the HIWI website were invited to “tell us why” they like Houston in spite of what we identified as “the twenty afflictions” – the heat, the humidity, the flying cockroaches, the no mountains, etc. We sent out a little over one hundred emails to announce the site, eliciting an outpouring of emotion. Scores of people daily submitted detailed, thoughtful, sometimes quirky, almost always heartfelt arguments on the city’s behalf. By early Fall, newspapers across the country, including the Houston Chronicle, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, had run stories about the campaign, calling Houston. It’s Worth It, the city’s new “unofficial slogan.” We were guests on an array of local radio stations as well as NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” and NBC’s Saturday “Today” show.

For phase II of the campaign, we decided to test the adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and asked people to “show us why” they liked the city. We teamed up with the Houston Center for Photography to create a “Houston. It’s Worth It – Show Us Why” open call exhibition in which Houstonians were asked to submit their personal photographs (as opposed to the stock imagery typically seen in convention bureau-type propaganda) relating to life in Houston. We received over 600 images, the great majority of which came from amateurs, and hung every one of them in the exhibition. Once again, HIWI was a rousing success, with the HCP breaking all attendance records over the brief weekend run of the show. We were so thrilled by the range of perspectives and idiosyncratic viewpoints in the show, that we instantly knew a book was the next step.