Local to Legendary: Nationwide & on the Scarborough Walk of Fame

Challenge:

Meet Camesha

Educator and founder of The Reading Partnership, a Scarborough-based literacy program that caters to helping the families of young learners in marginalized communities, in particular black families.

For the past 10 years, Camesha has been at the forefront of advocating for low-income families to receive the same degree of of education and representation as any of their wealthy and white peers. She has been out here putting the Unity in "community", her mind full of ideas to provide learners with diverse resources. So how much more thinking can she do to when she's already got so much on her plate and growing her team.

She had no time to make sure that after so many years, her branding remained consistent or that the content she created spoke to her ideal audience. An inconsistent brand identity made growing the connection with their current and potential families and the interest of potential donors difficult.

Imagine having a vision to provide education to diverse marginalized communities but not being able to communicate that visually in a way that supports their message.

10 years is a long time for an organization. It's not about redefining and changing who you are it's about -redefining as in remembering who they are and why they started and for who. Knowing that helped TRP with refreshing TRP's visual brand identity to be more aligned with their ideal audience - young learners and their families - but was such a drastic change that they'd be unrecognizable.

For an education organization that teaches a variety of diverse learners, at the time TRP lacked a variety of characters in the resources they shared.

With a better idea of the strategy that needed to be implemented, it was time to go back to the basics, being able to understand the audience primarily the learners. So what would make things more engaging? Appealing to children and knowing what they respond to. In an education-based environment it's important that the lessons learned are engaging. For children especially, visuals play a vital part.

Going back to the basics also meant going back to what were the basic learnings for the learners we targeted. I drew some inspiration from the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I would say it one one of the books I remember most from my kindergarten days.

I definitely wanted to portray the same feeling and playful attitude with in designs and illustrations with the creative ways things were arranged as well as how organic and rough the illustrations are. Though TRP has a lovely colour palette for their brand colours, I felt like it wasn't reflected enough in their past materials. Their website definitely got the message across but there was a bit of disconnect with their learning materials as well as their social media.

My goal was to make things more consistent and engaging for the team. viewers and young learners.

Together we worked to create a diverse set of characters that not only represented the various students with a range of family, cultural and ethnic backgrounds but also in the communities that surround them.

We went from just creating students to fill up a classroom but also their families and all the people within their community!

Covid didn't stop us from creating an online classroom-community where students still remained just as engaged and excited to learn.

Results? Characters who were human and real; that looked like the families with vast ethnicities and experiences that TRP would support. Created in a style that children would respond and relate to. With resources more in line with their goals and mission, TRP has run with it and upleveled their programs. Now they are running their programs nation-wide in Canada. With Camesha even recieving a start on the Scarborough Walk of Fame!