The Frontline Workers Counseling Project
In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, a therapist friend told me about a project he and colleagues had launched to give exhausted Bay Area health care workers access to free mental health counseling. I immediately took their cause to Chiat Day leadership, and in a matter of days, we’d taken them on as a pro bono client.
They didn’t have a name. They didn’t have a visual identity. They had no formalized messaging. What they had was a rapidly growing network of therapists offering their (normally quite costly) services for free. They soon broadened their offering to include all frontline workers – store clerks, delivery people, bus drivers, etc. – and they wanted to get the word out fast.
We gave them a name, a logo and a visual design system. A film soon followed, written by myself and featuring a donated score and donated front-line imagery from New York Times photographer Andrew Renneisen. More importantly, we created a social toolkit for the organization to share among the frontline worker community and workers’ family members, with the messaging laser-focused on one thing: getting frontline workers to take advantage of this potentially life-saving resource.
A year into the project, FWCP had 500 participating therapists who had donated roughly $500,000 in free therapy. FWCP served the Bay Area for 3 years before merging with the Therapy Aid Coalition in 2023.
In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, a therapist friend told me about a project he and colleagues had launched to give exhausted Bay Area health care workers access to free mental health counseling. I immediately took their cause to Chiat Day leadership, and in a matter of days, we’d taken them on as a pro bono client.
They didn’t have a name. They didn’t have a visual identity. They had no formalized messaging. What they had was a rapidly growing network of therapists offering their (normally quite costly) services for free. They soon broadened their offering to include all frontline workers – store clerks, delivery people, bus drivers, etc. – and they wanted to get the word out fast.
We gave them a name, a logo and a visual design system. A film soon followed, written by myself and featuring a donated score and donated front-line imagery from New York Times photographer Andrew Renneisen. More importantly, we created a social toolkit for the organization to share among the frontline worker community and workers’ family members, with the messaging laser-focused on one thing: getting frontline workers to take advantage of this potentially life-saving resource.
A year into the project, FWCP had 500 participating therapists who had donated roughly $500,000 in free therapy. FWCP served the Bay Area for 3 years before merging with the Therapy Aid Coalition in 2023.
TBWA Chiat Day
CD/Copywriter
CD/AD: Doug Menezes
Shoot
LBB Online
The Stable