Keeping families together.
The “child welfare” system is meant to protect children, but it often does more harm than good. Families experiencing poverty need support services and someone who believes in them. Instead, they face a family policing system, and decades of data show that Black and Brown families experience higher rates of surveillance and family separation. Yet the data also show that families have the best outcomes when they can safely stay together with community support. And that’s exactly what the Center for Family Representation exists to do.
Challenge
CFR’s model has grown significantly since its founding, and it was time to refresh the organization’s communication strategy—including its branding, positioning, and website to reflect the growth. CFR was much more than a “Public Defender” now. So, we set out together to reposition CFR’s work as a family defender, community partner, and policy change advocate working tirelessly to keep families together.
“CFR is working toward an abundant vision for communities, rather than simply trying to defend them.”
Approach
We spoke with leadership, staff, interviewed peers, and hosted interactive workshops. The importance of CFR’s origin story was clear in its day-to-day work and in its vision for the future. We needed to reflect the organization’s collaborative and interdisciplinary approach while also bringing in the diverse perspectives, experiences, and expertise of its staff, the community it serves, advocates, and peers.
INSIGHT
CFR’s voice is one of its most important tools in building trust.
CFR sees the real human impact of its work every day. A strategy at the core of the CFR brand is to speak plainly about the reality of family policing, the importance of a family’s agency, its deeply held beliefs, and by sharing the stories of families impacted by the family policing system.
INSIGHT
CFR is designed to work seamlessly against a seamless system.
CFR operates seamlessly within the system that it’s working to reform—where poverty is often confused for neglect, where parents are not aware of their rights, and where racism has guided policy and practices for decades. CFR knows every aspect of the system intimately and designed its groundbreaking model around it. This aspect of the brand story clearly demonstrates how CFR shows up for families in their communities, in court, and in the effort to change policies that hurt families.
THE BIG IDEA
A Strategic Repositioning—from Public Defender to Parent Advocate
The services CFR offers highlights the growth of its team, its model, and its mission. It demonstrates that CFR is much more than just a public defender—which carries its own perceptions. CFR’s brand strategy connects its mission, vision, and principles to its work and its teams in community support, family defense, and policy change.
CFR’s unique model is nationally recognized, and trains over 1,900 people every year on family preservation and representation. The model pairs a family with an attorney, social worker, and a parent who has been through the system before. CFR’s parent advocates are trained professionals who have had direct experience being investigated, being prosecuted in family court, losing their children to the foster system, and successfully reunifying their families.
“It can be hard to tell people unfamiliar with this work that you are opposed to the ‘child welfare’ system. This work is about fighting for a future of care and support, where families are given the resources needed to make themselves and their children safe. This work is necessary. The family policing system is punitive and harmful, and leads to more harm than good.”
My Role:
- Developed the plan for how we would approach research, discovery, strategy, and the design of the website, providing oversight throughout the project.
- Contributed to the brand and website assessment, helping establish a baseline for where the organization is today, where it is going in the future, and what goal progress looks like.
- Conducted interviews, surveys, peer research, and workshops and contributed to distilling insights from the qualitative and quantitative data the agency had collected.
- Co-authored the Brand Strategy, positioning, and messaging platform.
- Provided strategy and oversight during the development of the sitemap, information architecture, and the user experience design for the responsive website.
Other Contributors:
- The design team created a new logo and identity system and the mockups for the website.
- The engineering team developed the website on WordPress.
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