Brooklyn Backs Brooklyn: Mother Design & Brooklyn Org

Video

Redefining the look and feel of modern philanthropy.

If Brooklyn were its own city, it would be the third largest in the United States. And yet, when Brooklyn Community Foundation launched in 2009, Brooklyn nonprofits received just 2% of all NYC foundation funding. Since then, Brooklyn Community Foundation has moved over $100 million to Brooklyn nonprofits.

But Brooklyn deserved more. After nearly 15 years, the foundation understood that to truly make a difference in the status quo, they would need to make a dramatic shift. It was time the brand felt as big as its ambition—that it became an institution as iconic and inclusive as Brooklyn itself. So Mother New York and Mother Design developed a strategy to distance the organization from notions of traditional philanthropy, seen largely today as elitist, dysfunctional, and detached. Brooklyn Community Foundation should be reborn not only in look and feel, they posited, but in name: Brooklyn Org would be the champion for Brooklyn, the new model for community philanthropy, and the destination for all who care.

Join Kozue Yamada, Brian Reid, JP Napleton, Gonzalo Donoso, and Brooklyn Org’s Chief of Staff Liane Stegmaier for a behind-the-scenes look at the reimagining of Brooklyn.org.