Youth justice is different. From the moral and ethical, to the statutory, to the advocacy and communications, youth justice is a primordial opportunity to replace incarceration with community empowerment.
As a new venture, Catalyze Justice needed a brand strategy, visual identity, website design, and communications strategy to carry their founding team's deep expertise and experience in youth justice policy, practice, advocacy, and implementation, and to organize a sometimes adversarial set of audiences to imagine and build a safer future for kids.
Catalyze Justice's founding team had the genius, prominence, and experience, offerring the perfect opportunity to prove ambition and ideas with on the ground impact.
Approach Time to launch was tight and CJ's team was transitioning in from other organizations, so every step in our work had to serve multiple aims: Brand strategy, content strategy, and communications strategy. In our workshops with CJ stakeholders, we focused heavily on organizational strategy, their theory of action, potential conflicts among their audiences' needs, and CJ's unique value proposition. We offered sharebacks, careful to highlight dynamic tensions in their values and framing, and used that energy to propel us into visual identity, tone of voice, and content strategy ideation.
As a multigenerational venture, we were at first overly careful to balance radical innovation and incremental implementation. But we quickly discovered the elders were in certain ways bolder than their younger partners, wisely noting that radical is a misnomer: Catalyze Justice's work is fundamental. Considered buy-in, as always, leads to brilliant courage. This allowed us to temper the feeling and meaning of CJ's barrier-breaking work and create a correctly balanced and powerful brand with a sharp website and suite of branded collateral.
Impact
Catalyze Justice is full-on, bringing youth across the country home to their empowered communities, building programatic and philanthropic partnerships, and expanding their team. Our partnership has helped Catalyze Justice establish itself as a seasoned innovator, trusted advisor, and partner to communities, but it is, as always, the strength of their team and vision that truly makes moves.
We continue to support CJ as communications, product, and design partners.