Visioning Beyond Violence (formerly Vision Quilt) is a national nonprofit using art, education, and dialogue to prevent gun violence — giving young people and communities tools to imagine and build a world without it.

I joined as Design Lead and Development Director, but the role quickly grew into multifunctional leadership. I led the full organizational rebrand (including the name change from Vision Quilt to Visioning Beyond Violence), curriculum and program direction, fundraising and development, AI-powered workflow systems, all design and creative work, and the social media presence. The case study below walks through the major work.

Vision Quilt became Visioning Beyond Violence, a rebrand that reframed the organization around its mission and the young people it serves.

I co-led the naming. The shift from "Vision Quilt" to "Visioning Beyond Violence" came from a real conviction: the new name spoke more directly to the mission and resonated better with youth. Naming a nonprofit isn't just a creative exercise; it curates how every conversation about the work starts. "Visioning Beyond Violence" makes the goal explicit and the work future-facing.

The logo was a team effort. While I wasn't the lead designer on the mark itself, I was deep in the decisions that shaped it, including the call to preserve the "Visioning" wordmark font and the original color palette to maintain continuity with existing community and partner relationships.

From there, I redesigned the entire website to match the new identity and led the rebrand launch, coordinating the rollout across the org's public presence so the new brand landed cohesively on launch day.

A 2-minute launch video that holds two truths at once: the weight of what gun violence takes from families and communities, and the hope rising through Visioning Beyond Violence's work in Oakland and Portland. The piece names the reality without softening it, then turns toward what art, youth, and community can build in its place — guided by the org's motto: "What we can imagine we can create."

As part of a multi-year body of work, the organization's annual impact reports cover the rebrand transition and the period before it. I led the reporting end-to-end: gathering program data, structuring the narrative, writing, and designing each report. Together, they document three years of programs, partnerships, and community reach across multiple states, including California and Washington, and trace the organization's evolution from Vision Quilt to Visioning Beyond Violence.

The first full annual report under the new identity — a 24-page document capturing a transformative year of growth, rebrand, and programming.

Programmatically, 2025 was anchored by the Addressing Gun Violence (AGV) curriculum, delivered to 150 8th graders across Lighthouse and Lodestar through ELA, math, science, and art. A cohort of six students took their work to Oakland City Council to advocate for more programs like AGV — and student math scores improved after completing the unit.

In Portland, the "Envision a Future Without Gun Violence" exhibition ran May through November at Lewis & Clark College in partnership with the Art Therapy graduate program. Visitor evaluations showed 90% reported increased understanding of how gun violence affects people, and 78% reported increased intention to prevent gun violence in their families, schools, or communities.

Other major work documented in the report:

The official rebrand from Vision Quilt to Visioning Beyond Violence, anchored by the new motto "What we can imagine, we can create"

The VBV documentary, selected for the inaugural Arts in Healing International Film Festival with worldwide watch parties

Community presence at the Richmond Homebase Hackathon with The AI Homegirl, the "Free Your Mind" benefit at Chabot Space & Science Center, and the American Art Therapy Association National Conference

A formalized Facilitator Training Framework: 8 modules, 20+ hours, designed so educators, art therapists, and community leaders can deliver VBV programming with consistency

The completed VBV Art Box — 100 custom decks plus instructional booklet — a portable facilitation tool for classrooms, workshops, and community gatherings

The report closes with a 2026 roadmap focused on scaling the model: more facilitator training cohorts, expanded exhibitions and community dialogues, refined evaluation tools, and cross-city expansion beyond Oakland and Portland.

The 2024 report documented a year of expansion and infrastructure-building across Oakland, Portland, and Seattle. The defining milestone was aligning the Addressing Gun Violence curriculum with 8th-grade academic standards across math, humanities, and art — laying the groundwork for full school-wide rollout in 2025. In Oakland, five Lodestar middle schoolers traveled to the California Capitol for Moms Demand Action's Advocacy Day, and partnerships with Youth Alive's Teens on Target and HipHopForChange brought original music, poetry, and digital media into Castlemont, Fremont, and Skyline High Schools. In Portland, the org trained Lewis & Clark College art therapy faculty and graduate students as facilitators and supported a creative workshop with first-generation college-bound seniors at Parkrose High School. Nationally, Vision Quilt joined the Together We End Gun Violence Conference at Lumen Field (with the Seattle Seahawks and King County Office of Gun Violence Prevention) and the Fiber Arts Collective for community quilt-making. The year also brought a refreshed website launch, significant social media growth, and deepened partnerships across all three regions.

Vision Quilt's 2023 report captured a year of grassroots expansion across California, Oregon, and Washington. The year was anchored by the organization's eight-year partnership with Lighthouse Community Public Schools in East Oakland, where the "Addressing Gun Violence: Creating Visionaries, Storytellers and Changemakers" curriculum was implemented across two middle schools — culminating in a finale exhibition seen by over 600 people and a documentary film created for adoption by other schools. The report also documented the launch of Vision Quilt's Portland office (under retired attorney Margaret Hoffmann), an exhibition of student work at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and the Youth Alive! summer workshops, and Massachusetts artist Marge Barrett-Mills' 52 quilts honoring the children lost in 2022's school shootings. New partnerships with P:ear, Don't Shoot Portland, and Lines For Life expanded the org's reach into Portland. This was the first annual report I prepared end-to-end for the organization, the same year I joined as Oakland Project Manager.

A 30-minute documentary that follows the Addressing Gun Violence curriculum from classroom to community — Lighthouse and Lodestar middle schoolers studying gun violence through ELA, math, science, and art, then bringing their work to public exhibitions, City Council, and broader civic dialogue. Selected for the inaugural Arts in Healing International Film Festival in 2025 and broadcast globally through community watch parties, the documentary functions as both a witness to the work and a model for schools and community organizations who want to adopt the curriculum.

Three years inside Vision Quilt → Visioning Beyond Violence meant leading across roles that would typically belong to separate hires:

The rebrand: Co-led naming and strategy from Vision Quilt to Visioning Beyond Violence; led the website redesign, brand continuity decisions, and launch coordination

Annual reporting: Three full impact reports (19–24 pages each), designed, written, and produced end-to-end

Curriculum and programs: Design and creative support for the Addressing Gun Violence curriculum across school partnerships, exhibitions, and civic advocacy work

Facilitator Training Framework: Designed and rolled out the 8-module, 20+ hour training system for educators, art therapists, and community leaders

The VBV Art Box: 100 custom decks plus instructional booklet — a portable facilitation tool now in use across partner sites

Documentary: Creative direction on the 30-minute film selected for the inaugural Arts in Healing International Film Festival

AI and workflows: Built AI-powered agents and operational systems to support program delivery, communications, and team efficiency

Development and fundraising: Grant writing, funder relationships, and creative support for the $500K Healing & Hope Campaign

Design system: All ongoing design — program materials, event collateral, exhibition signage, social graphics, civic engagement assets

Social media: Strategy and execution across all platforms

Events and partnerships: Creative direction and coordination across exhibitions, City Hall advocacy, hackathons, conferences, and benefit events in Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Ashland, and Bainbridge Island

This is what living inside a small, fast-growing national nonprofit looks like in practice.

Most of what makes a small organization grow is invisible from the outside the hundreds of decisions, the side projects, the systems built quietly, the trust earned slowly. Three years partnering with Visioning Beyond Violence meant doing the work of multiple senior roles at once: creative direction, brand strategy, program, all of it together. The org grew alongside the work, and so did the impact from Oakland classrooms to national curriculum, from local exhibitions to international film festival recognition, from a small team to facilitator training cohorts across multiple cities.

This is the kind of work I'm built for — mission-driven organizations that need someone who can hold strategy, design, operations, and storytelling all at once, and who care that the work actually reaches the people it's meant to serve.

Watching youth move from classrooms to City Council, watching art become testimony become advocacy, watching a small grassroots organization become a national leader, that's why I do this work.