Maysaa Bazna
City to Sanctuary: from beloved program to fundable movement
What Maysaa came to me with
The work had already been working for fifteen years. Maysaa Bazna had built City to Sanctuary into a program reaching hundreds of kids across NYC public schools, with measurable shifts in attendance, behavior, engagement, and the kids’ relationship to nature. Principals felt it. Educators felt it. The kids felt it. What fifteen years of impact didn’t yet have was a brand, a website, or a structure that let the people on the outside — funders, principals, supporters — find their way in.
Maysaa came to me with substance and proof. The program had been running out of Westmoreland Sanctuary in New York, partnered with multiple NYC public schools, and the data was already in hand — surveys from kids and educators, principal reports of improved attendance and behavior, evidence that engagement and well-being lifted as kids spent time in nature.
What was missing was a way for any of that to land online as she set her sight on scaling the program beyond New York City. There was no funder-ready brand. There was no website that reflected the longevity, seriousness, or scale of what she’d built. There was no clear path for a principal who’d heard about the work from a colleague to understand the model in five minutes. There was no structure for a community member who wanted to support the program with $20 a month to know how. The program existed; the surface that would carry it didn’t.
That gap was the cost of the work she’d already done. Fifteen years of impact were sitting underneath a presence that didn’t yet match. Funders saw a small program. Principals saw a friendly contact. Almost no one — outside the people already inside the work — could see the movement.
Brand, site, and structure for a 15-year program
We worked together across brand direction, site architecture, donor structure, and ongoing strategy. The arc broke into four distinct moves — each one resolving a different layer of the gap between what City to Sanctuary was already doing and how the outside world could see and step into it.
1 Found a visual register both serious and warm
Our early sessions were about visual identity, but the question underneath was tonal. The work needed to feel credible enough to send to a school principal or a program funder — and warm enough that a parent or a kid would still feel themselves inside it. Most program brands resolve to one register and lose the other.
We reviewed multiple visual concepts together and chose a direction that could hold both. We defined the basics: color palette, typography, an illustration and graphic style that could show programs, impact, and supporters without tipping into corporate territory. The result was a visual container with the seriousness funders read as legitimacy and the warmth that signals “this is for kids” in the same glance.
2 Built site architecture that tells the full 15-year story
With a visual direction in place, we designed the structure of the site itself.
The homepage opens with a clear promise — what City to Sanctuary is, who it’s for, and why it matters — and then puts immediate proof in front of any visitor: impact stats, photos of kids in the program, language that reads to parents and principals at the same time. The Proven Impact page organized fifteen years of survey data and school-reported outcomes into the four categories that mattered most: behavior, attendance, engagement, and connection to nature. We wrote the outcomes in the funder language they needed without losing the emotional core that made them true. The About page held the fifteen-year arc — why Maysaa started this, what it’s grown into, and what’s at stake — alongside the photos and video that let visitors feel her presence and see the spaces and the kids. The How It Works page explained the school partnership model and what a semester actually looks like, written for the principal who needs to understand the lift before saying yes.
We iterated copy and layout for clarity, emotional weight, and scannability. By the time the site shipped, every page was doing a specific job for a specific reader.
3 Reframed the program as a movement people can join
The site could have stopped at “we’re a great program.” Instead, we made a deliberate frame shift.
City to Sanctuary became “a movement to increase children’s access to nature in cities.” That reframe changed what the site could do. A program asks for partners and funders. A movement invites people to join.
Underneath the frame, we co-designed a tiered supporter structure with named, simple paths: partner schools, larger gifts from funders, and monthly community supporters at $5–$50. We gave each tier a visual metaphor — tree, roots, leaves — so a visitor could see at a glance where they fit. The shift was subtle but real: the site stopped describing the work and started inviting the reader into a role inside it.
4 Stayed on as strategic ally
The fourth phase wasn’t a deliverable. It was a working relationship.
A funder-dependent grassroots organization can’t always afford a vendor relationship, so we shaped the work to fit the actual reality of grant timing, payment cadence, and pacing, so I could remain an ongoing thought partner. I’m available to talk through comms, press, principal outreach, and how to talk about the movement beyond the site. The brand and the site weren’t a one-time delivery; they were the start of a longer conversation about how City to Sanctuary moves in the world.
What’s different now
The first concrete change is that the site does work Maysaa used to have to do live. She can send a principal or a funder the URL ahead of a meeting and trust that the page will carry the story, the data, and the offer she’d otherwise be carrying alone in the room.
Nothing about the program needed to change — fifteen years of practice had already proven the work. What needed building was the structure on top of it: a brand, a story, and a set of named paths that made the movement as accessible from the outside as it had always been from the inside. The work is the same. The surface finally matches.