I Grow Chicago
Mission driven, community focused groups don't always have the budget or bandwidth to think about brand voice or how to apply copy across platforms. They're too busy doing the work. Stepping into an immersive, fast-pace effort to make an impact and offering on-call editing and strategy support is a chance to support .
After a volunteer experience as a family, I connected with the team at I Grow Chicago, a peace-focused organization working to champion peace, justice and equity in Englewood community connection, skill building, and opportunity.
Initial efforts were to think about how to support a committed and time-crunched leadership team on elements like regular newsletters and blog posts with an eye towards someday tackling the larger strategic copy needs of articulating the mission, work and impact of the organization to continue to build the base of donors, volunteers and public awareness.
An opportunity to pilot a four-day immersive with Lime Red Studio, the only UX agency in the United States that is a Certified B Corporation and Certified Woman-owned, gave us the time and team to take on building a new, expansive site for I Grow.
Joining the website immersive project at Lime Red Studio meant bringing the best of what I can do to a team used to working together. Think fast, write faster, solve problems, consider all angles, ask good questions. I also needed to shut up, listen, learn and collaborate to understand how the lockstep and legit team at Lime Red work. Every agency has a vernacular and a playbook. A fast learning curve to learn the names, processes and talents of a core Lime Red team of an exceptional design strategist, developer, ux researcher and designer.
We worked long hours over a short time to distill the needs of the website, the core audience and how to reach them.
Writing for an organization like I Grow means carefully checking my own prejudices, and privilege and staying centered on who, ultimately, we were working for—the citizens and community of Englewood.
The result is a website that tells a real, hard and expansive story about the neighborhood that would feel authentic to the residents of Englewood while also giving potential donors and volunteers a way to connect and give to an organization they believe in.
With her collaborative approach, Julie always seeks to understand the complexity of an issue before translating it to easily digestible content. She highlights our work with nuance and humanity. I always know that when I give a project to Julie, the results will make our world a brighter place.