guiding principles

We are rooted in community.

We commit to:

  • pursuing ongoing learning, self-reflection, candor and transparency about equity and justice in our organization and in our work through anti-oppression and anti-racist readings, trainings and retreats;
  • building relationships and partnerships that dismantle interlocking systems that exploit and shift power to marginalized communities;
  • continually evaluating our decision-making and strategy through the lens of equity and justice.

As a brand and communications agency, we are committed to building long-term partnerships, grounded in core values and mission. Our focus is on collaboration—working together to strengthen the nonprofit sector through foundational skill-building, sustainability and impact.

Our community centered approach is focused on connecting purpose and process to outcomes that are rooted in values and equity. Our work focuses on building foundational trust with our partners and co-designing accessible spaces that support the needs of their communities. We aim to not just be responsive and timely, but inclusive and consistent in our project processes & practices while building supportive and transformative relationships that center people over products.

Our sites are built with attention to accessibility so that all people can use them easily and effectively regardless of their barriers. Our dev team builds sites to account for a wide range of complicated and complex barriers, such as color blindness and vision impairments, neurological & cognitive conditions, and/or reduced motor & physical functions.

We also consider how individuals who may be dealing with technical barriers such as equipment access will interact with our sites and design around their needs. Our process allows organizations to account for the full needs of their community and reduce exposure to the legal consequences of accessibility noncompliance by offering support pages that include regular monitoring and Accessibility Audits & Reviews.

As a distributed agency you can find Rootid team members in California, Wisconsin, New York, and New Jersey.

The Design Justice Network Principles:

Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.

Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.

  1. We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
  2. We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.
  3. We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
  4. We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.
  5. We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.
  6. We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.
  7. We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
  8. We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.
  9. We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other
  10. Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.

* Adapted from https://www.alliedmedia.org/about/network-principles

“Attribution- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.” — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/