Online Design Bureau featured in the Dallas Morning News

STAR STATS
The star: Lorenz Lammens
The community: Dallas
The organization: Online Design Bureau, www.onlinedesignbureau.com

Lorenz Lammens has an American dream. As managing director of Online Design Bureau, a Dallas web design firm, his mission is to empower small businesses in order to build a strong nation.

Originally from Belgium, Lammens also makes reaching out to nonprofits a big part of his philosophy. The company typically volunteers its time once a month to reworking the website of a local agency.

Lammens recently redesigned the site for Heart House Dallas, which provides free after-school educational programs for at-risk children.

“Because of their focus on helping children and parents, to create a safe learning environment for them, that was in line with our mission to build a strong cultural and corporate America,” Lammens says.

As a child of a European culture and economy, Lammens says he has seen how a top-heavy government can stifle innovation. “People here get a chance to have a vision of their own, strike out for themselves, without the top directing everything,” he says.

When Lammens first arrived in the U.S. in December 2008, he volunteered his time helping companies while he established his residency. “I wanted to keep companies afloat, refocus their marketing and connect them within the community and make them economically stronger,” he says. He started his design firm in November 2009.

“Nonprofits, they can help each other, too,” he says. “They can grow networks and promote each other. If we can think strategically about the lines that connect them, if they can invest in each other, then real growth will happen.”

Lammens didn’t grow up volunteering in the community. He says he began giving back while he worked in the United Kingdom, where he first helped serve food to homeless people in a community kitchen.

“I realized that just feeding them doesn’t give them the tools to get out of the situation,” he says. “I began working at the YMCA and devised an active plan to re-educate people — their skills were outdated — and get them back in touch with the workforce.”

Many also struggled with depression, he says, and needed to rekindle a positive outlook on life. “You have to lift up their minds and make sure they get enough chances to get it right.”

Lammens says other nonprofits he has helped are focused on making America culturally stronger or finding innovation in the economy. A recent client promotes earth-friendly ideas in Dallas. “They not only promote living green, but they also support creating new technologies that can become an export in the future,” he says.

The arts are another important part of the equation, Lammens says. He’s helped support a local documentary maker and a fine arts organization. “Arts support a narrative, a narrative of finding a positive way of integrating the past with a vision for the future that’s optimistic.

“America has grown because of its sense of innovation, its can-do feeling,” he says. “Right now there is a lot of anger. We need to somehow transform that anger into positive energy.”

- Erin Booke