For more than two decades, Panta Rhea has supported grassroots organizations working on justice, sustainability, and power-building. But in 2018, Panta Rhea President and Co-Chair Lisl Shoepflin’s vision for the organization began to shift, sharpen—and turn southward.

“I was deeply influenced by the concept of reciprocity in the Andes, and how it could be applied to the redistribution of wealth and power,” she says. “It was a vision of an embodied, creative, and inclusive philanthropy working towards social justice and ecological sustainability."

In the years that followed, Shoepflin began to move the organization closer to this vision. Panta Rhea brought on non-family board members, and hired a diverse staff team with roots across Latin America and the Caribbean.

By 2024, the new strategic vision was ready to launch. But the organization had outgrown its brand.

Before AGO could help Panta Rhea find a brand voice and visual identity to fit its new strategic vision, we needed to go deep.

We began by interviewing 12 different stakeholders—including board members, team members, and grantee partners—to gain a clear picture of Panta Rhea and the relationships it has with the communities and grassroots organizations it supports.

We learned that, unlike other organizations, Panta Rhea needed a brand voice and visual identity that made its partners—not itself—the hero of the story. An intriguing challenge.

The key to Panta Rhea’s new voice was balancing their deeply held humility with their hard-won experience in philanthropy. So we made their values—respect, reciprocity, relationship, responsibility, and redistribution—the cornerstone of the new brand voice.

Working closely with the Panta Rhea team, AGO developed a new language around their mission, vision, values, and work. The first goal was to invite people in—to tell the Panta Rhea story in a way that was easy to understand. The second was to talk about the work without any alienating academic language or social justice jargon.

“Understanding the nuanced relationship between Panta Rhea and their regional partners was central to the work we did on brand voice and messaging,” said Gillian O’Neill, Executive Director of AGO. “Foundationally, the work they fund is about nature, people, and culture, so we started there.”

Over the course of months, we refined a brand identity whose shapes and colors draw on the places and peoples of the south. The Panta Rhea logo is two half circles—unity vessels—that symbolize reciprocity and a mission to collaborate with communities across hemispheres. These handcrafted bowl or basket-like shapes evoke sharing, nurturing, and local artisanal traditions.

The unity vessels also served as a fundamental inspiration for the rest of the visual identity. By deconstructing the bowls into separate, simple shapes, we were able to create a modular visual language whose individual elements can be recombined and adapted into an infinite number of graphic elements while maintaining a consistent, unified aesthetic.

The vibrant color palette was chosen with a decisive sense of place—Inca Gold, Desert Sand, Terracotta Earth, Caribbean Blue, Fiesta Fuchsia, Tropical Aqua, Andean Violet, and Amazon Green.

Finally, we chose a Montserrat typeface for the Panta Rhea to balance the handcrafted, organic elements with a more formal, contemporary aesthetic.