In 2020, Change for Kids faced a harder problem than a rebrand. The pandemic had exposed the limits of their existing model, and the organization needed to articulate a fundamentally new direction to the people whose support would determine whether it survived: board members, funders, and lawmakers. The strategic shift was clear internally. Making it legible and persuasive externally was not.

Brought in as a freelance designer, I partnered with the Senior Director of External Engagement to translate that shift into a strategic vision document. She led the planning process and drove content direction, often working out connections between ideas in hand-sketched diagrams. My work was to take that thinking and turn it into something a reader could move through without losing the weight of what was being said.

The document had to do several things at once: visualize relationships between mission, vision, values, and programming; carry emotional and policy stakes without feeling like advocacy; and reward a careful reader without requiring one. Those goals pulled against each other in ways that made the design problem genuinely difficult.