Freedom Tree.
Two years of annual reports, sponsorship materials, cards, and social assets — building a creative partnership with a nonprofit whose work genuinely changes and saves lives.
A mission that started
with one woman
and a conviction.
Freedom Tree was founded by Tara, who first set foot in Sierra Leone in 2005 as a newly graduated student. What began as a personal journey became a 20-year organizational commitment to a simple but profound mission: no woman should have to die giving birth.
Freedom Tree works to end maternal and infant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa — operating across three clinics, a Girls Advocacy Movement, a scholarship program, vocational training, prenatal curriculum development, and school construction. They also work with Indigenous communities in Alberta facing similar maternal health disparities.
This is the kind of organization where the design work carries weight — because what gets communicated here directly affects whether the mission reaches the donors and partners who sustain it.
Different every year.
Always recognizably
Freedom Tree.
The clearest brief Tara gave was this: she wanted the annual report to look genuinely different each year. Not a refreshed template — a new visual direction. New colours, new layout energy, new feeling.
That's a more demanding brief than it sounds. It means starting fresh creatively each year while maintaining enough visual continuity that the organization is still recognizable. I worked within the existing brand identity — the logo, the organic shapes, the photography-forward approach — but had significant creative freedom to develop colour direction, introduce subtle textures, and evolve the layout system while keeping the warmth of the brand intact.
Two years of
creative partnership.
2024 Annual Impact Report
A warm, earthy palette — soft teal, golden yellow, dusty terracotta, deep navy — with organic blob shapes and topographic line patterns adding texture without overwhelming the photography. Every spread designed to feel cohesive but not repetitive.
2025 Annual Impact Report
The centrepiece: a four-panel folding infographic marking Freedom Tree's 20-year journey. A piece that physically unfolds to reveal the full timeline — requiring not just design thinking but architectural planning about how content reveals itself across panels.
Sponsorship Packages
Three format versions — landscape (two iterations) and portrait — presenting Freedom Tree's tiered sponsorship program from Gold ($1,000) through Star of Sierra Leone ($50,000). Designed to make generosity feel accessible at every level.
Donor Cards
Birthday and thank you cards across multiple formats and colour ways — connecting donors to the mission impact their partnership makes possible. Statistics on every card so the gratitude is backed by evidence.
Social Media Assets
Including a birthday Facebook ad inviting donors to celebrate with impact — carrying the same warm visual language as the print work, adapted for the feed.
Design Exploration
Multiple creative directions explored before arriving at each final approach — including a bold, typographically driven alternate concept for the 2024 report that shows the depth of thinking behind the final choice.
The folding
infographic.
The 2025 report raised the complexity significantly. Tara wanted to tell the story of Freedom Tree's 20-year journey — which meant the centrepiece needed to be a designed timeline, not a simple list.
The solution was a four-panel folding infographic that physically unfolds to reveal the full 20-year arc. That format requires thinking beyond typical graphic design: planning the content hierarchy across panels, understanding what the reader sees at each stage of unfolding, ensuring the visual language holds together across a format that changes shape as you interact with it.
You don't get a complex, multi-format folding piece in year one. You get it when someone trusts you enough to hand you a genuinely hard problem.
Tara's testimonial is coming soon.
Doing meaningful work
that deserves design
to match?
Non-profits doing serious work deserve creative that reflects the seriousness of the mission. Let's talk.