Our membership community facilitates spaces to collaborate with like-minded partners, develop meaningful relationships and co-design strategies to put equity-centered values into practice.

what's included in rootid's community membership:

• Annual Communications Assessment to identify communications challenges, goals & organizational capacity
• Communications Roadmap document with project/focus outlined
• Three (3) Working Sessions with activities related to the outlined project and/or roadmap
• Dedicated Slack Channel within rootid's Community Slack for personalized, 1:1 attention
• Unlimited Access to Workshops & Roundtables for one year

Workshops
Workshops provide a space for deeper discussion and community connection. Typically 2 hours in length.

Roundtables
Roundtables are short format, meant to provide light touch, thought-provoking conversations. Typically 2 hours in length.

1:1 Working & Coaching Session
60-90 minute sessions including follow-up analysis/deliverables related to specific organizational needs.

The gift of community is that it offers each of us the benefit affirmation and support to achieve our goals—so join us and let’s build together.

*Membership dues are not tax-deductible, if you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution, you can donate online through our fiscally sponsored project with the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment.

Your contribution will:

• Support your experts & event producers
• Keep these workshops & roundtables open & accessible for all
• Help us support organizations & leaders as they use communications to tackle systemic injustices in the world

about our community

(common-unity) = a segment of the population united by a familiar thread

It's in community that we grow and learn with others. 

Over the course of a year, members will have access to participate & engage in hands-on activities & workshops, small group discussions, and 1:1 coaching with nonprofit professionals, service providers and funders. 

Our community roundtables and workshops focus on communications capacity-building topics such as: 

• brand strategy for mission & vision alignment 
• narrative development & storytelling
• gathering stakeholder feedback for deeper community engagement 
• developing meaningful metrics by analyzing data
• designing useful logic models to describe your work
• campaign design & fundraising 
• knowledge & project management

“We each had skills that balanced each other well, all felt strongly about contributing to positive change and making an impact through communications.” - Val 

This sentence sums up the founding of rootid. But since storytelling and providing the details is what we do…here you go!

In hindsight, rootid really began when I moved to the Bay Area in the Fall of 2008; after a Habitat for Humanity trip to Guatemala to celebrate my 30th birthday. Prior to moving, I worked for a well-established car company, but knew that “selling cars” was not going to feed my soul, no matter how nicely it fed my pocketbook. I loved the people I worked with, but I needed to feel like I was contributing to making the world a better place. It was time to revolve my life around “being the change I wanted to see in the world.” 

Upon my arrival, I began contracting with Design Action Collective and building my own client base of companies/organizations whose missions I supported. These projects were not only for non-profits or activist organizations, they were also for small businesses and individuals whose values and vision aligned with my own (in one shape, or form). 

Val & Andrew

It was about this time that I met Andrew Goldsworthy.  I first met him on a construction site in Oakland where I was a volunteer photographer for new Habitat For Humanity home builds. We clicked immediately and I offered to volunteer my design services for them as well. Recognizing that we had complementary skill sets, we decided to take on some contract projects together. The first of which was OperaWorks;  they needed a new website. Though I was not necessarily a huge fan of opera music at the time, I felt a real kinship with its founder, Ann Baltz. She had vision and was spending her life and career training performers to find their internal voice, to listen to themselves and to use that grounding as the basis for their artistic practice. As an artist who had recently been on my own internal journey, I connected with what OperaWorks was helping young singers achieve. 

Val & Jason

Jason and I began dating in the Winter of 2009. Though Jason and I had only been dating a short time, we started working on projects together almost immediately. You would think this would have been a real killer to our relationship, but somehow it seemed to actually give us a strong foundation of trust, mutual respect and complementary learning for the journey we were stepping into together.

The winter of  2010 to spring 2011 was a time of change for all three of us. Andrew decided to leave Habitat and move to Argentina; and Jason and I were feeling pretty secure in both our personal and work relationships. I started talking with each of them about the prospect of joining forces together…We became rootid on May 12, 2011. We have always been ‘rooted in community.’ That’s how we first decided on our name—from the beginning we have been rooted in the idea of a collaborative communications model that co-develops strategies and effective tools based on listening to community needs.

From year one until…
In year one, with just a staff of three we focused primarily on nonprofits from the community.  We were fortunate to begin with four relatively large clients,  and about 10 small clients that first year, the most notable being Habitat for Humanity East Bay (now East Bay Silicon Valley), California Family Health Council (now Essential Access) and UC Berkeley–all of these are still clients to this day. 

The first five years were filled with changes and growth. We believed strongly in ‘growing your own’ so focused the majority of our hiring on training interns and helping them grow into junior and mid-level staff members. We grew slowly and organically in those early years, evolving from being three white co-founders to mentoring and then hiring our first employee, to then bringing in design and development interns; and as our staff grew, so did our offerings. By year five (2016) we were focused solidly on nonprofit and social good entities and had worked with close to 60 small to mid-sized organizations. 

Through each of these experiences, we found that organizations (of all sizes) all needed the same fundamental brand and communications help—aspects like understanding how their values translated into the work they actually did, who their target audiences were and how to more effectively engage and deepen relationships.

Though our work was feeling relevant and thoughtful, it was in 2019 during our second 2-day intensive and followed by a conversation about how equity was infused in our work, that something shifted within me and I realized that we were not fully embodying the values we intended to be rooted within—we were centering belonging, but white supremacy culture characteristics were showing up in our organization, workshops and within us as individuals in ways that needed reflection and change. 

Over the next several months, I began my journey of deeper understanding, working to find thought leaders and community voices that modeled what I felt that we were missing. I attended National Equity Project workshops, the Social Venture Partners International conference where I had the privilege of listening to both john a. powell and Edgar Villanueva speak—and eventually found the Design Justice Network Principles and the Liberatory Design Process which have become foundational to rootid’s values and how we embody those values within our work and relationships.

So here we are 11 years later. The company we built together is one I am truly proud to be a part of. Grounded in the values that align with the core of who we each are as people and the ways we want to show up in relationship with our communities and planet. To date, we have engaged with over 400 unique organizations across our agency and community outreach work. rootid currently has about 20 - 30 ongoing retainer clients, 10 or so new clients each year and with the community engagement events we have planned, we expect our total number of nonprofits served to be upwards of 500 by the end of 2022. 

And now our mission into the next 11+ years...

We join with others, envisioning a world where those most impacted are prioritized & communications & technology are used to heal & empower rather than divide.

When someone says the words, “it’s time for a rebrand,” does your heart skip a beat? 

In this 3-part series, we will examine a community-centered, values-embodied approach to the rebrand process. Part 1 will explore how we begin by centering the needs, experiences and voices of those closest to the outcome of our work, inviting you to examine how perfection and urgency might show up for you and your team. Part 2 will invite you to dive deep into iteration and 'safe to fail' experimentation, using liberatory design process principles to 'imagine,' 'prototype' and 'try' new approaches to your communications strategies and materials. Finally, Part 3 will discuss ways to embody IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Accessibility) values in your brand rollout. 

Part 1: Making the Case for Doing This Differently

Does just the idea of rebranding, changing your logo, messaging and the rest of your visual identity across your various print and media assets send a shiver up your spine as you think about the stakeholders you will need to include, and the opinions you will need to balance? The politics and fear that this process evokes can trouble even the most well-balanced, calm and intentional organization.

Re-envisioning your brand is a huge undertaking and though it should be taken seriously, it does not need to cause as much heartache nor as many headaches as it often does.

Instead, what if we imagined this as an iterative process that worked into your everyday workflow?

An interactive process invites:

• stakeholders and constituents to be included

• direct as well as anonymous feedback to be collected and iterated upon

• everyone to feel like they are part of a cohesive and collaborative team experience

What if I were to tell you that this process does in fact exist; newly termed the Community Centered Rebrand. In the Community Centered Rebrand, the visual materials are designed, tested and retested in real time response to internal staff and community input. Your messaging is iterated upon as you go; and your logo redesign comes last.  

Let’s take a step back and remember that marketing is an experiment—technologies are constantly changing, politics and funding are often in a state of flux, and internally there is always some amount of team turnover and institutional knowledge gained and lost. It is only our dominant culture (read white supremacy culture characteristics, in particular, perfectionism and sense of urgency) that tells us we need to get it perfect on the first try, or somehow ‘flip a switch’ and change everything at once.

We do not take for granted that this is serious business and could potentially change the trajectory of your organization, but taking a more iterative, community-centered, and thoughtful approach makes this process feel more collaborative, connecting, and trust-building rather than exclusionary, problematic, power dynamic focused, and, well, often soul crushing.

Iterating vs. Perfecting

The problem with the typical rebranding process is that everyone goes into it with the pressure of perfection looming over them. Many Executive Directors don’t even want to touch it with a 10-foot pole because of the stress that the mere idea evokes. The complicated feelings and power dynamics between board members and senior staff are often centralized in this process, But, what if we approached rebranding work through the lens of IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Accessibility) and used the liberatory design process as our guide?  

An approach like this has the potentiality to bring people in your community closer together, galvanizing support for your mission and in turn “contributing to greater organizational capacity and social impact.” (Stanford Social innovation Review) 

The idea behind the Community Centered Rebrand, prioritizes the needs of your internal stakeholders and those you are in service to by beginning by assessing where you are, what‘s working, what’s not, who comprises your audiences and stakeholders; and how you want them to feel about your organization at the end of this process. 

The first step is to look at your communication assets and materials. Ask your staff what materials they need to be more successful in their work, what tools would make their lives easier, what assets community members need that they are not getting as easily as they could? 

Begin by redesigning these materials first since they are actually the most impactful brand vehicles you have.

To begin this redesign process, we start by creating mood boards. Mood board development allows you to establish an updated visual language for your organization without addressing your logo, and is a great tool for community inclusion. 

Mood boards are collages/collections of fonts, imagery, colors, photography treatments and other elements (that best represent your org) that you can share with community members for feedback. We often begin this process with a community town hall where we have group discussions around color theory, fonts, imagery, etc. feel most aligned with your organizational core values and how those can potentially be applied across various contexts. We will usually include initial mood boards or sketches at this time as well as a survey to gain anonymous insights & feedback from those who either can not attend or are not comfortable sharing their perspectives publicly.

Words for the Wise

In order to make this work feel accessible and inclusive please provide materials at least 24 hours hours ahead of time, translated into whatever languages are needed in your community and make sure you have interpreters for the event itself. If you are thinking, 'that is too much work' or ‘we can’t afford that,’ consider from the perspective of those in your community who are neurodivergent or non-English speaking, even if they seem fine with however you communicate regularly, they will probably appreciate the additional care you have taken.

When we create mood boards, we usually begin with 5 directions and iterate over 3 rounds till we land on one final direction. We then use the final version as the basis of our updated visual language. Mood boards are great because they can also act as a mini-style guide that you can build upon. 

Now it is time to start updating collateral and other communications assets. In your anonymous survey you would have included a few questions about what assets people really use on a regular basis and what tools would help them do their jobs more effectively. That information will be what determines which materials to start redesigning first. 

The board and senior staff may lean toward choosing your Theory of Change, Annual Report or Strategic Plan, because those are often what funders or external partners want to see, but this approach centers the needs of your internal staff and those you are in service to, first. So when or if you feel pressure to begin with one of the above assets, take a moment to consider those materials are useful to the rest of your staff. Depending on your answer, perhaps consider that a slide deck, brochure, one-sheet or flier template might be a more useful first choice? 

In Part 2 of this series we will explore iteration and ‘safe to fail’ experimentation using liberatory design process principles to ‘imagine,’ ‘prototype’ and ‘try’ new approaches to the application of your new visual language across your branded materials. 

Stay Tuned!