New year. New website. Same commitment to workers.
Welcome to the brand new ReproJobs.org! We’re so excited to share our new website, logo, brand, and mission with you, full of resources, for you to use as you change the policies and culture in your organization. We started ReproJobs in 2014 as a social media account to help our friends get jobs in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements. We didn’t really know what it would become. Now, five years later, we took the time to refocus, re-envision, and dream of what we want our movement to become for workers. With that came the opportunity to create our first website, articulate our mission, and design a new brand that visually expresses our new chapter. We’re inspired by the creativity and intentional change processes of so many brilliant folks in our field, so in the spirit of transparency, we want to share our process in arriving at this new chapter with you.
After years of leading from the hip, we decided we needed to sit down and actually name our vision and values. As we thought about our work and the change we wanted to see in our movements, we focused on the idea that our movements—and the progressive community-at-large—should be leading in workplace policies. We should be creative in the ways that we support workers, their families, and our communities. We should have workplaces where employees are encouraged to grow their families, financially stable to do the work they love, and have the paid time off they need to care for themselves, recover from a miscarriage, and travel for an abortion. And most of all, our organizations should have policies that are as good or better than the ones we’re fighting for, particularly in this political moment. Our movement cannot profess one vision in the streets and push a different one in the (spread)sheets.
With that in mind, we’re excited to share our brand new vision of what we hope our workplaces can become and offer to each and every one of you:
ReproJobs believes in the radical possibility that organizations within the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements can lead the progressive movement by providing healthy, supportive, and empowering workplace environments that include inclusive cultures, generous policies, and thriving wages.
We also have a new tagline, focused on the things that are central to our core work:
Thriving wages.
Thriving workplaces.
Thriving people.
We also decided to identify and clarify our values. Although we’d been operating off of these values for years, it was a thoughtful exercise to sit all together and think about what our values actually are and express them to you. Like you, we’re still growing into our values and figuring out what they look like in our movement, our community, and our own lives. We expect that they will evolve over time, especially as we identify our own blind spots. But, clarifying them helps us declare what we want workers in our movement to experience.
We believe that all workers have the right to:
Organize and demand accountability from management and leadership
A thriving wage and transparency in how that wage was determined
Respect and dignity, which is a crucial component of fulfilling the mission of any reproductive health, rights, and justice organization
We believe in thriving and inclusive workplaces, which include:
A culture of respect for employees as full human beings both at work and outside of work
Transparent, compassionate, and honest management practices, including frequent training, support, and evaluation of managers from their direct reports and peers
Detailed employment and benefits policies that reflect the values of the organization and support employees both in doing their jobs and sustaining healthy lives
Thorough, equitable, and clearly defined hiring practices that explicitly address racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of discrimination
Frequent meaningful opportunities for staff to name how systems of oppression and privilege operate within the workplace in order to transform these systems
Finally, we spent the fall and early winter ideating what ReproJobs should be visually. We put out a call for proposals and of the 35 we received, we chose to work with cultivate strategies, a DC-based graphic design and communications firm founded by the co-organizers of the popular trans and queer dance protests, Carla Aronsohn and Firas Nasr. Together we talked about ReproJobs, where we want it to go, and how to embody that visually.
cultivate strategies created several concepts of possible logos for us to choose from.
Caption: Different options of the ReproJobs logo.
Caption: Different options of the ReproJobs logo.
The concept we decided to move forward with was rooted in references from Harry Potter, particularly a golden snitch (although unlike J.K. Rowling, we love, support, honor, and cheer on our trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary family). It is an homage to our anonymous names—Hermione and Luna—a desire to create magic in our movement, and our solemn swear that we are up to no good. (One of us is Gryffindor and the other is Slytherin!) As cultivate strategies wrote in the concept note, “The snitch represents many things—first, it is flying towards the left, which emphasizes the need for organizations to move and align with progressive values. While finding a job can feel like catching a golden snitch, it is also important for people to acknowledge that they themselves are golden snitches—they have power and ultimately determine the game.” And, many of you are snitches on your own organizations’ bad, unsupportive policies.
Caption: Early iteration of the ReproJobs logo.
Caption: Early iteration of the ReproJobs logo.
Caption: Early iteration of the ReproJobs logo.
For the colors, cultivate strategies pulled from people, characters, and ideas we are inspired by, including Harry Potter and Beyoncé. We wanted the colors to be a lot of things: bold and warm, cool and calm, motivating and relaxing. We wanted our website to feel like a coworker’s office; a place where you feel safe to share the challenges that are ailing you, but also the resources that motivate you to create change and organize.
Caption: Early iteration of the ReproJobs color palatte.
The final color palette was inspired by Queen Bey herself, in the “Hold Up” video. As cultivate strategies wrote in the concept note, “think unapologetic Beyoncé smashing the nonprofit industrial complex and catching a sweet win against Voldemort (i.e. oppressive management), all in one.” The colors stemming from “Hold Up” represented our twinned feelings about the movements: we love it so much and want to make it better, yet our frustrations make us want to take a baseball bat to them. “Hold up, they don't love you like I love you, Slow down they don't love you like I love you...this such a shame you let this good love go to waste.” We have great leaders and dedicated workers within our organizations; we shouldn’t let that talent go to waste or disrespect it by not treating workers with the respect they deserve.
Good design should tell a story. It should be irresistible. It should show your values and inspire people to take action. We hope that this one gives you a bit more insight into our new brand, logo, vision, and values, and the next chapter of our work. We are thankful to cultivate strategies for their design vision and creation of our new site of resources for you so we can all build the progressive and supportive workplaces we deserve.