Building HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
activating resident voice and power
introduction
Connecting Communities, Centering Voices
Building Healthy Communities Monterey County finds ways to ensure all youth have quality education, social-emotional and physical health, access to green space, healthy recreation, and leadership pathways that dismantle and fully replace the school-to-prison pipeline.
This project began an effort to revision and merge community funder and fiscal sponsor Action Council, with their largest fiscal sponsoree, Building Health Communities. They approached rootid with a reimagined vision for the future that needed to be reflected in their name, tagline and updated logo.
Before doing so, they wanted to engage in a deep, inclusive and thoughtful community discovery process. As a fiscal sponsor of a variety of projects, Action Council wanted to make certain that residents across their county felt heard, valued and a sense of ownership of the design process and its outcomes.
Work Completed:
community engagement
team building
visual rebrand
messaging
links:
REIMAGING LEADERSHIP
Co-designing an Inclusive Rebranding Process
During the discovery process, rootid identified the need to develop a design team for the rebranding process that included organizational, resident and community leaders. This new group would not only represent their varying community groups, but would hold collective decision making power, making it essential that they learn and grow together as a team.
We began this work by facilitating a bilingual virtual retreat that included sessions around values alignment, identification of working and communication styles, as well as the design of a community-centered project roadmap that included renaming, logo design, messaging and the development of new brand collateral such as business cards, letterhead, social media, and slide deck templates.
renaming a BILINGUAL organization
A Name that Reflects the Community it Serves
Throughout this process, it was important to keep a connection to the past while also creating a new brand that reflected all of Monterey County.
Through rootid’s research with community leaders, staff, board and residents, it became clear that everyone felt a close bond to the words building, healthy and communities and liked the idea of uniting under that name. From that decision, we worked on co-developing a tagline that aligned with their updated mission, vision and values, choosing words that felt resonant in both Spanish and English.
The final name, Building Healthy Communities Monterey County / Construyendo Comunidades Saludables Condado De Monterey now included a tagline that further centered their values: “Solidarity • Voice • Power / Solidaridad • Voz • Poder.”

logo reDESIGN
Stakeholder Input Drives Logo Redesign
Once the renaming process was completed, rootid and the design team set out to build a new visual identity as well as organizational messaging.
We collected outlined criteria and goals that we wanted to the new logo to depict. These included feeling resident centered and reflecting anti-racism, black and brown solidarity, community power building, healing and dignity.
The logo and color palette also needed to be visually representational of the agricultural lands, seascapes and people of Monterey County. Our final logo illustrates abstract people with open arms in the form of crescent moons waxing and waning—embodying concepts such as the Four Directions from indigenous cultures and the sacred path of the sun and human beings.
key brand messaging
Giving the Brand a Voice that Resonates
With the visual logo developed, rootid moved onto the development of brand messaging.
During our research process, our team developed a set of target audience profiles. These profiles focused on the values that connected these audience members to the organization. Through these alignments, our messaging team developed a set of key messages to engage and compel action.
The messaging was revised and finalized through a series of message testing sessions with the design team as well as residents from across the county.