Black Youth Can
CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals
with Publicis Groupe Canada (pro bono)
2021 – 2023
Services
Brand Strategy
Stakeholder Research
Brand Foundation & Creative Brief
Web & Experience Design
Cross-agency Collaboration
Senior Experience Designer, Publicis Sapient
Founding member of the working group
Co-led research & brand foundation
Led design of BlackYouthCan.ca
CEE came to Publicis Groupe Canada with a modest ask: refresh the website. Underneath it sat a bigger problem. After ten years, hundreds of graduates and a 96% program retention rate, the charity had almost no public profile. And the young Black professionals it trained were still being judged on a first impression before they reached an interview. Black youth in Canada faced unemployment at nearly double the national rate. Publicis assembled a 40-person volunteer team from seven agencies to give CEE a brand foundation and its first-ever campaign.
Two and a half years, start to launch. A brief-process workshop with CEE's leadership, 360-degree stakeholder interviews with the founder, board, staff, a corporate partner and eight alumni, a brand foundation workshop that landed on a single word, a creative brief that gave the creative teams their tension and truth, a pitch to Publicis leadership to fund production, then campaign, film, hoodies and website through to an August 2023 launch.
The Impact
A brand platform, Black Youth Can, that CEE can build on for years, and a first campaign, Who I Really Am, that reclaimed the hoodie as a wearable résumé for nine real alumni. Website visits rose 760%, CEE received over 13,000 program queries and its first-ever waiting list, and $500K of donated media put the alumni on Dundas Square, Union Station and the TTC. Silver at the 2024 Strategy Marketing Awards and a D&AD Wood Pencil.
The Goal
Give a ten-year-old charity a brand it could grow into, and a campaign that would make Canadian employers look twice at the young Black professionals they were overlooking. Do it with a volunteer team spread across seven agencies who had mostly never met, and make every piece, from billboard to website, carry the same idea.
Overview of the process
1. Background & the ask
2. Brief-process workshop
3. Stakeholder interviews
4. Analysis & research themes
5. Brand foundation workshop
6. The creative brief
7. The platform & the idea
8. The leadership pitch
9. Campaign planning & comms
10. Casting the alumni
11. The hoodies
12. Film concept, storyboard & production
13. Web design: BlackYouthCan.ca
14. Launch & amplification
15. Results & awards
16. Reflection
Results in numbers
Website visits during campaign
New program queries
Out-of-home impressions
Earned media impressions
LinkedIn page views
TikTok video views
Donated media value
Volunteers across 7 agencies
1.0 Discovery & Strategy
Background: the ask under the ask
CEE, which stands for Careers, Education and Empowerment, is a Black-led, Black-serving Toronto charity. It trains Black youth for careers in tech, finance, trades, social services and entertainment, and wraps that training in social workers, therapists and a community its members call family.
Their proposal to Publicis listed everything a rebrand could include: name, logo, colours, website, social strategy, digital ads, video, print, templates. What it could not yet say was what CEE stood for in one sentence. That was the real gap, and it is why the engagement became two deliverables rather than a website: a brand foundation first, then a campaign built on it.
Brief-process workshop
February 2021. Nine people from CEE's leadership, board and front line joined us for a creative strategy workshop. We worked the classic prompts: We exist to… We believe… What is the big human problem we are trying to solve?
The room produced the raw language that would anchor everything later. Forever changing can't into can. Your village starts here. Professionalism doesn't have colour. We don't leave anybody behind. And a warning from CEE's executive director that stayed with the whole team: Black people were made to build this country, not to be part of it. The close from our creative lead set the bar: the work should make you excited and uncomfortable.
Stakeholder interviews
Spring 2022. With strategist Emma Bayfield I co-wrote the discussion guides and ran the sessions: a group discussion with eight alumni, the founder, a social worker, a board member, and corporate partner Hudson's Bay Foundation.
Every guide had the same spine so answers could be compared: first impressions, CEE as a person in one word, strengths and weaknesses, and one projection. It's 2030 and you're reading a headline about CEE. What does it say?
Analysis & research themes
We coded the transcripts into four clusters: family, home and shared experience; vulnerability, confidence and self-improvement; accountability, inspiration and empowerment; community, change and optimism.
One word kept returning from alumni and staff alike: family. A staff member gave it its proper name. It's the principle of Ubuntu, I am because we are. That line became the centre of the brand.
Brand foundation workshop
June 6, 2022. A half-day session with CEE's leadership. We played the research back theme by theme, then for each element of the brand, vision, conviction, purpose, personality, values, essence, we brought two or three written options and asked: which do you prefer, why, and what would you change?
The room reshaped almost everything. The vision gained an economic claim. The personality words we proposed were replaced with four of CEE's own. But when we put Ubuntu, I am because we are, on the screen, they recognised it immediately as something they already said to each other. A good essence is found, not invented.
The creative brief
June 2022. The brief turned research into a problem worth solving creatively. Context: unemployment 70% higher among Black Canadians, one in three Black youth out of work, yet Black Canadians more likely to hold a degree. The enemy was the narrative, in founder Kofi Hope's words: Black youth are not the problem. We are the solution.
Tension: the Black community is too often seen as a strain rather than a strength. Truth: elevating it is in everyone's interest. The one thing: CEE is built on Ubuntu. One mandatory: this must not feel like a charity appeal.
2.0 Creative, Campaign & Launch
The platform: Black Youth Can
The Leo Burnett creative team, art director Natee Likitsuwankool and copywriter Appanna Chetranda under executive creative director Scott Pinkney, answered the brief with a manifesto and three words. Ten-plus years, 500 graduates, a 96% retention rate. By every measure CEE is a success story. But for the Black youth who make up CEE it is more than that. Because when you transform every can't into a can, it propels Black youth forward.
Black Youth Can is a platform, not a tagline. It is a declaration that can hold every future campaign, and it gave CEE a wordmark and a URL in the same breath.
The idea: Who I Really Am
Young Black people are judged on what they wear before anyone hears what they have done. The black hoodie is the most loaded example. So the launch tactic reclaimed it: initials and a self-description on the front, real achievements set around WHO I REALLY AM on the back. A wearable résumé.
The concept came with a full ecosystem from day one: staff tees, a runway launch, a design-your-own-hoodie site, influencer sends, social and print. Not all of it shipped. Enough did.
The leadership pitch
September 2022. To move from concept to production we needed Publicis Groupe Canada's executive committee to fund media, production and the time of forty people across seven agencies. The deck we presented is the spine of this case study: Part 1, the brand strategy, built from the research; Part 2, the creative concept, built from the brief.
Leading with strategy mattered. Leadership was not being asked to like an idea. They were being shown a chain of evidence from interview to essence to platform to execution, and asked to back the chain. They did.
Campaign planning & comms
Comms and media were led by the Publicis communications team and Zenith Media. Their plan ran in three beats: excite, engage, extend. Black Youth Can carried the belief that when Black youth thrive, Canada thrives. Who I Really Am carried the person. The primary audience shifted to employers, hiring managers and corporate donors, which is why the media landed near office towers and on LinkedIn.
Zenith secured $490,800 of out-of-home space at no charge, including full-motion dominations of both Union Station concourses, Dundas Square, the Eaton Centre and TTC platforms. Total cost to CEE: $2,050 in posting fees. Every channel pointed to one destination, the Black Youth Can landing page.
Casting the alumni
The campaign is only as strong as the people in it. A casting brief went to CEE in November 2022: charismatic, comfortable on camera, a powerful backstory and a clear vision, and diversity of age, gender and career. A one-page overview and questionnaire went to candidates in January 2023, asking for their story in their own words: I'm a future coder. I write my own destiny.
Alumni meet-and-greets and interviews ran through February and March with the creative team and the director in the room. Nine alumni were selected, spanning film, fashion, tech, finance, accounting and photography.
The hoodies
Jason Blackwood was in CEE's first cohort and went on to found the apparel brand Grandslammer$. He produced every hoodie and starred in the campaign in his own. Each of the nine designs is a blueprint of an interview: graduation year, awards, festival selections, volunteer hours, set in a type system that works at hoodie scale and at billboard scale.
Rules of engagement kept the idea sharp: never mass-produced, one person per hoodie, always made by a Black-owned business.
Film concept & production
Before the film was scripted, I cut a concept reel from stock footage to give Scott Pinkney, the project lead, a sense of what we might make: Be doctors. Be models. Be architects. Black Youth Can. It was one of several concepts the team tried before landing on the hoodie direction, and each one taught us something about tone: honest, not charitable.
The final film, Who I Really Am, was directed by Kobi Ntiri, produced by IQ and Maker, and voiced by alumnus and filmmaker Mike Regis. Shot July 7, 2023.
Storyboard & script
March 2023. The creative team and director Kobi Ntiri turned the script into a shot-by-shot board. The script changed as it was boarded: the first draft spoke as a chorus, We are not perpetrators. The boarded version speaks as one person, Let me ask you, who am I to you? That shift made the film a portrait, and it is why an alumnus voices it.
Every line pairs with an image of everyday bias: a hoodie on a chair, a store security monitor, car doors locking. Then the reveal on the back of a hoodie.
Then the ground shifted. In spring 2023 the economic climate hit agencies and the production budget was cut dramatically. We went back to the boards and asked what the film needed, not what we had wanted. The robot went; the hoods pulling back stayed. The leaner script is the better one.
Web design: BlackYouthCan.ca
The website was my lead deliverable. The comms plan gave it a role: the destination every asset drives to, built for employers and donors, and meant to outlast the campaign. I turned that into three jobs: land the film, give each alumnus a home for their story, and convert attention into action.
A single black scroll so the hoodie system carries from street to screen. The film first, then the wordmark, then nine alumni tiles that open into their stories, then the asks in the order the plan set: join a program, become a partner, donate, post a position. Built in Webflow with tech lead Matty Rivera and digital production director Melanie Jarcaig so CEE's small team could maintain it without an agency.
Launch & amplification
August 15, 2023. The campaign launched with a takeover of Union Station, alumni and staff standing under the screens in Black Youth Can tees. Over the following weeks the nine alumni appeared on Dundas Square, in the Eaton Centre, on TTC platforms, transit shelters, highway boards and elevator screens near the employers CEE trains for.
Each alumnus posted their hoodie on LinkedIn with a note to employers. Personalised hoodies went to Black creators in custom boxes for unboxing content. Coverage followed on CP24, CTV, Newstalk 1010, HR Reporter, Strategy and Little Black Book.
The film: Who I Really Am
The anthem film as it ran on BlackYouthCan.ca, YouTube and at the Union Station launch.
Results & awards
The numbers CEE reported after the campaign window: website visits up 760%, LinkedIn page views up 88%, TikTok video views up 400%, more than 13,000 new program queries and, for the first time in CEE's history, a waiting list. Media partners donated more than $500,000 in space, delivering 170 million out-of-home impressions and 17 million earned media impressions.
Who I Really Am won Silver in Promotion at the 2024 Strategy Marketing Awards and a Wood Pencil plus a Shortlist at D&AD 2024. It was Publicis Groupe Canada's largest pro bono effort to date and the first in an annual commitment to a Canadian non-profit in the DEI space.
Outcome
CEE got two things it did not have before. A brand foundation, with an essence, values and a voice, that every future communication can be measured against. And a platform, Black Youth Can, with a first campaign that put nine of its graduates on the biggest screens in the city and a website that turns that attention into applications, partners and donations.
For the alumni, the outcome was personal. In Mike Regis's words, seeing his story shared across the city gave him a whole new level of pride. For CEE's executive director, the most profound lesson was how crucial it is for the community to witness itself positively represented at that scale.
Reflection
The thing I would tell any designer joining a project like this: the strategy work is the design work. The hoodie idea, the film, the website and the billboards all trace back to a sentence a staff member said in an interview, and the discipline that turned that sentence into a brand wheel is what let forty people across seven agencies pull in one direction for two years.
The second lesson is about leadership without authority. Nobody on this team reported to anyone else. What held it together was a shared artefact at every stage: the discussion guide, the brand wheel, the brief, the leadership deck, the comms plan, the tracker. When I led the website workstream I applied the same rule: one source of truth, updated weekly, visible to everyone.
What would I change? I would have built the measurement plan into the website from the start so CEE could report on hires, not just visits. And I would have fought harder to ship the design-your-own-hoodie experience, which was the piece that let the public join in rather than just look.
The team
Client
Agapi Gessesse, Executive Director, CEE
Executive sponsors
Andrew Bruce, CEO, Publicis Groupe Canada · Stephanie McRae, Head of DEI · Jessica Savage, DEI Executive Sponsor
Creative
Scott Pinkney, CCO, Publicis Hawkeye · Natee Likitsuwankool, ACD/Art Director · Appanna Chetranda, ACD/Copywriter, Leo Burnett
Strategy
Emma Bayfield, Senior Strategist · Chris Whyte, Group Strategy Director, Publicis Canada · Aleeza Yermus, Leo Burnett
Experience design
Kevin Chinbuah, Senior Experience Designer, Publicis Sapient · Matty Rivera, Tech Lead · Melanie Jarcaig, Director of Digital Production
Accounts
Daniel Vescio, Account Director · Deb Sanyal, Account Supervisor
PR & influencer
Nicole Grant, SVP, North Strategic
Production
Kobi Ntiri, Director · IQ & Maker · Alex Chan, Photographer · Grandslammer$, hoodies
Media
Nikki Stone, Steve White, Marina Matyash, Zenith Media
The sun is shinning over here and it's gonna be a goodyear…