14 years ago, Honduras became the only country in Latin America to ban the morning after pill.

This ban represented a massive step backwards for Honduran women, with predictable results: Since then, 350,000 underage girls have become mothers. Today, one out of every four Honduran girls will become pregnant before turning 18.

Given the severity of the situation and the failure of local efforts, the brief defined a singular yet complex goal. We had to influence key political actors, including the President of Honduras, to address the issue in official government proceedings.

To achieve this, we would first need to accomplish the following: Find a way around the local media embargo, as defined below, in order to generate coverage and conversation about the issue of the plan B pill.

After many years of working with the client, using every activist play in the book, from lobbying to civil disobedience to paid media, we had discovered that the challenge went far beyond messaging, design, or targeting. Even the most shocking statistics and stories were not enough, when the conservative establishment blocked us at every turn. Media outlets refused to cover us. Government officials turned us away. Law enforcement was used to intimidate us.

The only way to change the law was to persuade or force government officials to take action. But how could we do that, when they simply turned a blind eye to any and all efforts? We needed to break the institutional barriers that had been set up against Honduran women’s voices, without a budget— luckily for us, there was one thing the client possessed in abundance: courage.

The question then became: How could we channel that courage, going outside of Honduras itself to provide a solution for women and capture the attention of the world?

Over the course of nearly 4 years, we explored international collaborations. Every time, our proposals were rejected for being “too risky.” Clearly, no one else matched our willingness to do whatever it took. The genesis of the idea came as we began to imagine a strong Honduran woman standing alone on an island.

To execute this idea, we built a platform, safely anchored in international waters outside of Honduran jurisdiction, and organized regular trips and supplies to provide women with a pill— but this was only a short-term solution. Our objective was to pressure the government to repeal the law, and for that, we needed international attention. We decided to focus on the compelling stories of the courageous women who used the platform.

We filmed these journeys and created short-form videos designed to be irresistible for sharing, with a simple call to action: sign our petition. Our initial target audience would be Millennials and Gen Z, selected for their progressive values and responsiveness to meaningful content. By building the conversation in this way, our action would quickly become newsworthy, allowing us to expand our reach even further by pitching to global newsmedia outlets with a press release, interviews, and multimedia assets