Shiftingthe focus to a fully integrated approach

In the healthcare space, feeling welcome is one thing.

Being seen, wholly understood and completely supported, that’s a different thing completely.

Ahead of the opening of its new one-of-a-kind facility, the Black Health and Social Services Hub Peel (HBSS) engaged with us to create a brand platform that would meaningfully resonate with their Black, African, and Caribbean (BAC) clients, staff, stakeholders, and partners.

Working directly with BHSS as well as leaders from its three partner organizations; Roots Community Services, CMHA Peel Dufferin and LAMP Community Health Centre, our team immersed ourselves in learning and collaborating. Understanding how this not-for-profit organization operated, its core beliefs, guiding principles, mandates, and needs was critical in devising our insight-led strategic foundation.

Together, we built the brand around a more expansive ambition: to put thriving at its centre. Rather than allowing the challenges of the existing healthcare system to define the narrative, the strategy focused on what becomes possible when care is designed differently – around the whole person, their community and their ability to thrive.

Creatively, we translated the strategic foundation into an identity that balanced that warmth and joy with confidence and gravitas. Together, we explored expressions that acknowledged the breadth and depth of BAC communities without expected symbols or tokenistic cues, while feeling distinctly different from traditional healthcare, yet maintaining the credibility of a leading-edge institution.

At the heart of the selected identity is a graphic device that quite literally places the client at its centre – transforming one of the brand’s most important strategic commitments into a distinctive and flexible visual idea. The result is an identity that doesn’t simply communicate a different kind of care. It embodies the shift from responding to inequity to creating the conditions for people to thrive.

CHALLENGE

As a newly established collaboration, the BHSS Hub needed to create an authentic and credible brand that could reflect the diversity, culture and aspirations of Black, African and Caribbean (BAC) communities in Peel while establishing a distinct identity for a first-of-its-kind model of care.

OBJECTIVES

• Build trust without relying on surface-level cultural representation or the traditional cues of institutional healthcare.
• Feel culturally affirming and representative of the breadth of BAC communities, while delivering a clear, intuitive and seamless experience across real moments of health and social care.
• Facilitate alignment and ownership across a complex stakeholder ecosystem, including community members, frontline teams, senior leadership and the Hub’s three partner organizations: Roots Community Services, CMHA Peel Dufferin and LAMP Community Health Centre.

SOLUTION

GDG built the brand through a collaborative, co-created process, working closely with BHSS senior leadership and stakeholders to ensure the strategy was grounded in both community needs and organizational realities.

At the heart of the strategy was a clear client promise – defining the experience every person should be able to expect from the Hub, regardless of where or how they access care. This became the connective tissue between the Hub’s vision and mission and how the brand would show up in practice.

From this foundation, we developed the positioning, tone of voice, manifesto, client experience principles and reasons to believe, creating a strategic system designed to align both brand expression and service delivery around a shared promise.

GDG then translated the strategy into the visual identity, developing the selected direction into a cohesive brand system, guidelines and suite of assets.

The result was a brand built from the inside out: community-informed, anchored in a meaningful promise, and designed to make a leading-edge new model of care tangible at every touchpoint.