Shed Light, Oakland

Brand, product and creative for an activist-startup

In 2007, Brandon D. Anderson lost someone he loved to police violence (in Brandon’s own words here) This started him on a path that brought him to found Raheem, an independent service for reporting police conduct.

Raheem’s mission is to bring in the community’s side of the story, building a body of data that can inform policy, hold police accountable and drive change.

The beach-head of the project is in Oakland, where Wild Shore is based, a city known for bad policing.

To establish a presence here, we worked to create brand, product interface and marketing campaign, with a simple goal: to get communities of color talking about their encounters with police. And in so doing, shed light.

That sparked the concept for the brand identity: sunlight that cleanses and illuminates.

The digital product embraces a straightforward, honest clarity: offering a simple interface for sharing your story along with the reasons why this data will help. (Design by Wild Shore. Development by the quality folks at Penso Co.)

The marketing creative is centered around powerful portraits (shot by Gioncarlo Valentine) of Oakland residents brave enough to share the stories of their encounters with police, sometimes photographed in the places these incidents happened.

The Raheem Street Team supports ground-level efforts, talking to people in the community and capturing their stories.

In this case: brand identity, user experience and marketing creative as a single powerful idea, repeated over and over across channels.

Along the way Brandon got invited to TED 2019 to tell his story — and Raheem was covered in Fast Co, Axios and more.

For us personally, grappling with this topic — which people of color do every day with much bigger stakes — was both painful and meaningful.

We’re proud of the role we played in this launch and happy to have met and worked with Brandon. He has a vision for, in his words “a world where people of color are able to live and love freely.”

Founders see the world as it could be, and work to make that change — that’s a fundamentally creative act, and reminds us that the real purpose of creativity is to change things for the better.

Wild Shore is a creative company. We work with founders, entrepreneurs and marketers to build modern brands.

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