Portland artist Leslie Lee started The Soul Box Project in 2017 after the October 1 Las Vegas music festival mass shooting. The massacre prompted Lee to look up statistics about gunfire deaths and injuries in the U.S. and, as an artist, she realized the magnitude of the numbers was incomprehensible without some kind of visual to humanize the count of individuals taken by gunfire. She published a website asking people to make small origami boxes – Soul Boxes – to represent victims. The Boxes are small, lightweight, inexpensive and easy for anyone to fold and embellish with art, messages and memorials for specific people.

The overwhelming response led Lee to establish a nonprofit, raising funds to display Soul Boxes in public places around the country. In 2021, after two COVID-19 delays, Lee and hundreds of volunteers reached their goal of exhibiting 200,000 Soul Boxes on the National Mall in Washington D.C. – viscerally revealing the gunfire death and injury toll of only two and a half years. The exhibit’s media outreach exceeded 500 million.

To ensure The Soul Box Project remains accessible to individuals and organizations raising awareness of U.S. gun violence, its website continues to serve as a Do-It-Yourself toolkit. The Project is also supported by 57 Soul Box Project Branches nationwide—including a First Unitarian Branch led by Arlene Gardener— which now display and share the display panels from the D.C. exhibit.

Recently the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health has become the national headquarters for the Project under the leadership of Kathleen Carlson, Professor of Epidemiology, OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Director, OHSU Gun Violence Prevention Research Center. Leslie Lee has stepped down as Director.