ABOUT

THE CHALLENGE
A grassroots group in Horsforth, Leeds had no shortage of good ideas. Warm spaces, art projects, climate initiatives, volunteers turning up wanting to help. What they didn't have was one identity to bring it all together, and without one every project was applying for grants on its own, competing for the same pot, telling a different story to whoever was listening.
THE INSIGHT
Since Covid, people had a stronger pull towards where they lived, but a lot of good ideas were falling by the wayside for a much simpler reason: low confidence, and nowhere to take that feeling. Aims came down to three things, support people to personally thrive, listen to the community and respond, support the community to achieve.
We didn't start with a logo, we started with why any of this mattered, the purpose. What kept coming up was that people living in the same place didn't feel like they belonged to it. Welcome, but not quite home. Somebody said "we belong here" in the session and it just landed.
THE APPROACH
We tried a fair few names before landing on the right one. Rooted. Rise. Root & Rise. All had something, none of them had everything. ‘Belong’ won because it was short, it wasn't an acronym, and it gave people an instant sense of place without needing to be explained.
Before any visuals, we built the full brand positioning — vision, mission, values, personality, how the organisation wanted to behave. If Belong was a person, it's resilient, a grafter, a safe pair of hands, neighbourly, but a radical thinker too. That's a proper tension to hold: approachable and warm, but serious and effective when it needs to be. Little steps, big sound. Moving at the speed of trust.
That same tension ran through the palette. Not the rainbow most charities reach for. A teal green with a hit of hot pink, something that reads as warm in the community and credible in front of a funder, dialled up or down depending who's looking at it.
Even the wordmark carries the thinking, Belong is built from around 25 individual shapes, circles, half circles, leaf forms, which became the charity's iconography to, representing all aspects of the community coming together to create a bigger picture.
THE RESULT
One flagship identity, built to sit over multiple services, credible enough for funders, warm enough for the people it's actually for. Three audiences it now speaks to directly: people with an idea who need help making it real, funders who want proof of impact but no connections on the ground, and philanthropic organisations who know what's needed but need someone local to make it happen.
A name doing the job an entire organisation used to have to do on its own.