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Meeting the Hope Program

It’s a rainy sum­mer day and I have made the trip to down­town Brook­lyn to meet with Irene Camp and Jen­nifer Mitchell, Devel­op­men­tal Direc­tor and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, respec­tive­ly. They’re locat­ed in a big old ware­house of a build­ing at a busy inter­sec­tion near the Ful­ton Street Mall.

It’s late in the day and the reg­u­lar office staff has gone home, but there are still some stu­dents and staff work­ing on ter­mi­nals and end-of-the-day stuff. The admin­is­tra­tive offices are locat­ed to one side, with offices and a large wait­ing room. There, I final­ly meet them, two engag­ing, cheer­ful, and opti­mistic women who love what they do and want you to know about it.

After a brief tour of their facil­i­ties, we sit down and talk about what they are look­ing for in the design and the brochure. First they bring me up to speed on how far the project has come and their take on the pre­vi­ous design work. The ear­li­er designs they thought were too boxy, rec­tan­gu­lar images with columns of type, and the over­all look was not real­ly dis­tinc­tive. Jen­nifer then showed me an exam­ple of some­thing she liked. It was from a dif­fer­ent non-prof­it that served a sim­i­lar mis­sion. It was sim­ple, bold and mod­ern fea­tur­ing close up black and white images of clients sil­hou­et­ted against a white back­ground and areas of deep blue and red. They used a sim­ple sans serif type­face, a lay­out that allowed for lots of white space.

From there I sug­gest­ed an idea of using a full-body group shot of some of their suc­cess­ful clients in their work clothes, with sup­port­ing images of the train­ing sit­u­a­tions on the inside spread. We could show the vari­ety of skills they have as well as the types of busi­ness­es where they work. The vital­i­ty of the images would let prospec­tive employ­ers feel a per­son­al con­nec­tion with these peo­ple and real­ly sell the pro­gram.

Jen­nifer and Irene real­ly like the idea and start think­ing of who they could round up for a group shot. They have a pro­gram that trains peo­ple for the food indus­try and one of their can­di­dates was an intern at Mur­ray Cheese; they were very proud of him.

So this is the tack I will take in devel­op­ing the design. They’re still not sure, though, of how they want to dis­trib­ute it and though their favorite sam­ple was a 7-inch square I sug­gest that we start with a for­mat that will fit into a busi­ness enve­lope in case they want to do a mail­ing. If a client has doubts, I pre­fer to be a lit­tle cau­tious. Also I want to be able to save them some mon­ey.

But this project needs to get start­ed because the writ­ing and research have been done and the Tap­root group wants to do a pre­sen­ta­tion at the end of the month. Let’s have fun.

The start of a project.

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.

cover and spread of older brochure.

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.

A volunteer’s experience.

I signed up with Tap­root to make new con­tacts that would be out of my reg­u­lar pro­fes­sion­al sphere, to have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do some­thing new, and, per­haps, do a lit­tle good for this world. Being between projects can make one rest­less, and even a lit­tle bug­gy.

Tap­root, if you don’t know, is an orga­ni­za­tion that match­es up pro­fes­sion­als from the cor­po­rate world with non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions that could use their exper­tise. Appli­cants can be from either side of the equa­tion; non-prof­its can use Tap­root to find qual­i­fied pro­fes­sion­als to work on spe­cif­ic projects that the non-prof­its need done, but don’t have the exper­tise to com­plete. On the oth­er hand, the cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als go through a screen­ing process that assess­es their skills and abil­i­ties and match­es them to projects that the non-prof­its need done. These are called ser­vice grants.

These grants can serve any num­ber of goals, such as devel­op­ing a web­site, cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, busi­ness analy­sis, board recruit­ment, fundrais­ing projects, and so on. Doing all the things that non-prof­its need done by pro­fes­sion­als, but don’t have the bud­get or exper­tise to do them­selves. This is where the vol­un­teers come in—various smart, hard-work­ing pro­fes­sion­als with skills, exper­tise and the desire to help out. This is where I come in.

www.taprootfoundation.org