ERA: Bringing Coherence to the Narrative and Field

Clarifying the Mission

The EcoRestoration Alliance is a global network of scientists, practitioners, and Indigenous leaders working with forests, wetlands, watersheds, and farms. The work they do as individual members is urgent and meaningful, but their shared identity was unclear.

They asked us to help clarify their mission and translate that clarity into communications, an identity, and a brand.

At first, we focused on understanding what their members were already doing—the projects, the science, and the relationships. It’s important work. ARARA is a climate finance platform designed to channel capital directly into forest protection and restoration efforts across the Amazon. The Nakivale Refugee Regenerators are restoring soil and water through regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, and education. The Panama Restoration Lab is a regional hub for nature-based solutions that restore the Panama Canal watershed.

But it quickly became clear that the more pressing question wasn’t about documenting the work but about direction. What is needed in the world of ecological restoration, and what role could this young organization actually play on a global scale?

Nature Already Knows How to Restore Itself

One idea kept coming back: nature already knows how to restore itself. ERA isn’t directing that process. It’s supporting it—connecting people, projects, and capital with nature.

From there, another implication became clear. If living systems—forests, soils, wetlands, the movement of water—are actively regulating climate, then restoring them isn’t a side effort. It’s part of the system that keeps the climate stable.

That reframing was crucial to ERA’s identity and message. For a long time, the central story in tackling climate change has been carbon—reducing emissions, capturing carbon, storing it. This is necessary work, but carbon is only one part of a much larger set of processes. Living systems circulate water through the atmosphere, influence cloud formation, cool surfaces, and affect weather patterns in ways that don’t fit neatly into carbon accounting.

When those systems break down, the effects are felt quickly. When they recover, the benefits can be just as immediate—and often more visible to the people living there.

Restoration, we came to understand, is not an add-on. It belongs at the center of the climate conversation.

Bringing Coherence to a Fragmented Field

This is where ERA began to come into focus. Not simply as a collection of people doing good work, but as something that could bring coherence to a field that is otherwise scattered—a way of connecting scientific understanding, local projects, and funding so they reinforce each other.

The design followed from that clarity. The logo took time, but the final mark—a small bird carrying a leaf—arrived at something we had been circling: the understanding that nature restores itself. The gesture in the bird—carrying, connecting, contributing—is quiet but active. It suggests how a small, local act can participate in something much larger.

Everything flowed from there. The website, pitch deck, and social media branding all grew out of that clarity. This has been our experience again and again: when the central idea is clear, the rest follows. The language, typography, color, and imagery align in a natural way. They all point in the same direction.

Building the Foundation for Scale

As ERA clarified its mission, that clarity began to show up elsewhere. Jon Schull, ERA’s president, wrote an in-depth white paper, Cooling the Climate Quickly, which sharpened the scientific case behind this perspective. That, in turn, clarified their fundraising materials, which began to bring in support.

The work ERA is doing on the ground is the heart of who they are. But to scale that work—to attract real capital—the communication has to be in place. That’s what we’ve been building.

Our work with the EcoRestoration Alliance is ongoing. We’re supporting their communications and developing a model for fundraising that can sustain long-term work—both for the central organization and its member projects.

The opportunity—and the need—for ERA is significant. With continued clarity, it has the potential to position itself not just as a participant, but as a leader in the global effort to advance ecological restoration as a core response to climate change.