Taproot Project For the HOPE Program

I’d begun look­ing through the ser­vice grants on Taproot’s web­site and it seems most of them are staffed now. But then I get an email from EJ Minor who has been head­ing up a grant for a non-prof­it called the HOPE Pro­gram. Locat­ed in Brook­lyn, its pur­pose is to help New York­ers liv­ing in pover­ty to devel­op self-suf­fi­cien­cy, through job train­ing and employ­ment and coun­sel­ing ser­vices and has a very high suc­cess rate. The Tap­root team that EJ is head­ing is work­ing on a mar­ket­ing brochure for last six weeks. The brochure should help HOPE out-reach to new employ­ers and devel­op intern­ships and oppor­tu­ni­ties the peo­ple they train. Their cur­rent design­er dropped out due to ill­ness and would I be inter­est­ed in join­ing their team as the design­er. “Sounds sim­ple enough”, I say. “Tell me more.”

There’s a full crew involved. EJ, the project man­ag­er, along with a copy­writer, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and mar­ket­ing guru and has recent­ly com­plet­ed most of the ground­work. They learned as much as they could about HOPE’s mis­sion, train­ing meth­ods and effec­tive­ness. They inter­viewed clients and employ­ers to gath­er state­ments that could be used in the brochure to show the impact HOPE has made through its ser­vices. At this point they are writ­ing the copy and want to get the brochure designed and into pro­duc­tion by the end of August.

I have some con­cerns though; what is their bud­get, how it be dis­trib­uted, does it need to be mailed. I’m going to have to meet with the prin­ci­pals and to get a bet­ter idea of what they’re look­ing for. EJ and I dis­cuss their bud­get, which might be and some­thing around $2 per piece, but that it’s not a con­cern right now. He just wants some­thing that’s real­ly “cre­ative” and that I should real­ly let loose with any ideas I come up with.

He emailed me some of their ear­ly sketch­es done by the pre­vi­ous design­er and images of past HOPE Pro­gram brochures. They def­i­nite­ly need an update and it’s time for some leg­work. I need to meet the client.

And ear­li­er HOPE brochure from the 90’s. It has some nice images and the die-cut is a nice touch, but it only shows one aspect of what they do. The new brochure needs to address a broad­er range of ser­vices and work set­tings.