I recently started working on an interesting volunteer project for the organization EPIC which pairs creatives with not for profit organizations who are in need of design services. It's a fascinating process that achieves a re-branding effort in a short period of time by quickly building a creative team and getting them to work intensively to solve the problem at hand.
The NFP my teammates and I are working with could not be more inspiring — it is the 46 year old Cabrini Green Tutoring Program that helps economically disadvantaged grade school children by pairing them with an adult tutor. The tutors of course help their kids with their homework, but also offer coaching in life skills and provide much needed encouragement.
Our primary task is to come up with a new name for CGTP that reflects the history of the organization, the value and importance of its services, and its current and future growth into other parts of the city. The current name is finding itself to be a challenge, due to the negative connotations of "Cabrini Green."
However, it's not quite as simple as that ... there are a lot of passionate feelings around the name of the organization, and we've been doing our best to soak up as much data as we can to start generating informed ideas about where the naming process could go.
And the plot thickens ... In addition to trying to reconcile the conflict of viewing the name as "negative and outdated" versus representative of the history and origins of an organization that has helped children for more than 50 years, we also have to find ways to differentiate the organization from tutoring programs that are for profit businesses; it is important to the survival of the organization that it not be confused with other programs that are not dependent on donations.
I can't wait to see where we take things, and I'm really enjoying the process of working with a team of really great creative people that I've never worked with before. I know we are going to do a fantastic job.
