In mid 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, global protests for racial justice and with impacts of climate change becoming ever more immediate and urgent, we were considering how Shared Assets needed to change.
We knew that we needed to grow our capacity and our impact in order to address the urgency of the need for a more just, sustainable and resilient land system.
We had just established a new Movement Building function to sit alongside our existing Consultancy and Research work, and we were facing the same uncertainties as everyone else about what impacts the pandemic would have on our wider work. Meanwhile the need for equitable access to green space, more resilient food systems, a rapid carbon transition and a more just land system were increasingly topics of mainstream media coverage.
We had changed, the world was rapidly changing, and so we recognised that the way we talked about ourselves, and our work, needed to change too.
We engaged Cohere Partners to help us develop a new messaging strategy that would communicate the need for - and possibility of - radical change and which would work across our diverse audiences of commercial clients, researchers, activists, think tanks and people working with land. We then brought on board Impact Edit to help us create a new visual identity and website that would reflect that new approach.
For our messaging we wanted to add more ambition and edge to the language we use. The political, social, environmental and economic upheavals of recent years have opened up possibilities and exposed the urgency of the need for change. They have made more radical and ambitious change palatable among more traditional audiences who increasingly recognise systemic change as a necessity, and a basic requirement for activists and younger, more politically engaged audiences.
We also know that we can’t address the pressing issues that we face - housing, racial justice, climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, ill health - without working with the land and changing the current land system.
Working with Cohere we developed ‘with land we can’ as our new lead slogan.
You’ll be seeing a lot of it in our future communications, and in lots of formulations; with land we grow, with land we connect, with land we create etc….
We also hope that over the coming months you’ll adopt and add to it yourselves in relation to your own projects and campaigns. The ‘we’ in ‘with land we can’ is all of us, not just Shared Assets.
This slogan aims to communicate our ambition, purpose, commitment to partnership and focus on results and we hope will provide a rallying cry for our movement building work. You can see how we will be applying it across our different areas of work below.
Our new visual identity is more of a refresh than a radical change but aims to be cleaner and sharper and just a bit of an update as we gracefully retire our old logo and colour palette with gratitude for 10 years of great service.
The new website reflects our new structure and main areas of work as well as the different ways in which we are working with others to reimagine our relationship with land.
It also finally provides us - and you - with a comprehensive and easily searchable archive of resources, tools, case studies, project summaries, and FAQS, and has a full suite of accessibility tools.
We’re excited about these changes and the future, and will be using our new tools in earnest in the new year across our newsletter and social media channels including our new Instagram account. We hope you’ll make good use of them too, and join us in reimagining the land system so that we can work together to create a more just, sustainable and resilient future.
With land we can!