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We are rooted in community.
In partnership, we co-design necessary spaces for strategic thinking, sustainability & growth—using communications & technology as vehicles to advance equity.
We join with others, envisioning a world where those most impacted are prioritized & communications & technology are used to heal & empower rather than divide.
We commit to:
- pursuing ongoing learning, self-reflection, candor and transparency about equity and justice in our organization and in our work through anti-oppression and anti-racist readings, trainings and retreats.
- building relationships and partnerships that dismantle interlocking systems that exploit and shift power to marginalized communities.
- continually evaluating our decision-making and strategy through the lens of equity and justice.
We strive to deeply contribute locally, nationally and globally by helping to develop the next generation of changemakers, social entrepreneurs and technologists. We do this by partnering with local organizations to provide mentorships, internships and employment opportunities to under-represented community members that continue on as team members at rootid, or onto other personal and professional paths. rootid also partners with nonprofit organizations and foundations to build the business, communications and technological capacity of smaller, growth-focused nonprofits through workshops, webinars and probono consultations.
As a brand and communications agency, we are committed to building long-term partnerships, grounded in core values and mission. Our focus is on collaboration—working together to strengthen the nonprofit sector through foundational skill-building, sustainability and impact.
As a distributed agency you can find Rootid team members in California, Wisconsin, New York, and New Jersey.
The Design Justice Network Principles:
Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.
Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.
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We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
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We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.
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We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
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We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.
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We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.
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We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.
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We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
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We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.
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We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other
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Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.
* Adapted from https://www.alliedmedia.org/about/network-principles
“Attribution- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.” — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/