The Mission

Buena Semilla create peer-led support groups – Women’s Circles – to empower indigenous Maya women to become agents of change in their lives and communities. In the Circles women talk, share and support each other in a safe space facilitated by trained peers, including traditional midwives and community health workers.

The Challenge

Buena Semilla’s vision is to expand the Circles for other sections of the community. However, they have struggled to break the funding loop of moving from research grant to research grant. To expand their work, they needed to secure new sources of funding, which requires developing a stronger identity and presence as an organisation.

The Collaboration

Fundraising

Through workshops and training sessions, Ember worked with the Buena Semilla team to identify alternative ways of funding their work, beyond academic grants. We developed a new fundraising strategy that would help the organisation become more sustainable.

Branding and Communications

Securing funding from new sources required that Buena Semilla have a strong, cohesive and credible identity as an organisation. Through multiple rounds of design, the Ember and Buena Semilla teams renewed the project's brand identity, creating a new logo that reflects their core values, mission and ethos.

We then supported the Buena Semilla team in creating a new website with compelling and up-to-date content that showcases the work they do as well as their unique approach.

We then worked together to develop a strategy for communicating Beuna Semilla’s story to a wider audience beyond the academic sphere, through a variety of channels.

Articulation

Everything Buena Semilla does is underpinned by a clear set of values, the most important of which is its participatory approach. Being able to articulate what makes your approach different to other people's - and why that matters - is a key to successful fundraising. We therefore worked with the team to find a visual way to communicate their values-led approach to community mental health, which you can see below.

Visibility

To support Buena Semilla in building their profile, particularly beyond the academic sphere, Ember showcased this innovation as a story of impact at the Time To Act on Global Mental Health event held in September 2018 at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This was the first ever UN event dedicated to mental health.

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