Panta Rhea
Panta Rhea is a family foundation that supports people building power, honoring culture, and regenerating nature across the Caribbean and Americas. AGO worked closely with their team to create a vibrant brand story and identity to launch their new vision.
Summary
Panta Rhea is a family foundation that supports people building power, honoring culture, and regenerating nature across the Caribbean and Americas. AGO worked closely with their team to create a vibrant brand story and identity to launch their new vision.
What we did
Research & insights
Strategy
Stakeholder engagement
Brand design
Messaging guidelines
Content strategy
“How does the new brand voice and identity help Panta Rhea achieve its goals?”
Marc Landers
Impact
One year after launching our pilot program, our processes have become more efficient, our program is more engaging, and the results are already surpassing expectations:
511 activists
from 65 organizations participate in the community
15+ initiatives
in collaboration with 33 local Thai experts
71
new work opportunities for people in the movement
Hundreds
of new connections for future collaborations
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.
A visual identity rooted in the Indigenous cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean
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.
Here’s how it works:
1
Provides a space for activists to practice coalition building. Powerful coalitions create real change, but building them is a skill.
2
Locally-led, which encourages long-term engagement and guarantees relevance. Topics are chosen and taught by and for people in the network
3
Utilizes a Growth Cycle method—a process-driven approach to propose and select topics—to ensure that learning spaces are mutually supportive and enhance collective outcomes.
4
Focus on skills, and not issues, creates shared purpose and mitigates potential social or cultural debates.
5
Grassroots-led accountability and transparency elevates real value. Organizations must adopt and embrace this authentic, peer-evaluated approach. No superficial reporting or glossy photos, only genuine learning and growth.
6
Wide range of viewpoints contribute to the curriculum, producing better content and a more united community with a shared vision.
7
Decentralized knowledge base to ensure equitable access to rural and less affluent individuals and groups.
8
Opportunities for career growth for activists and organizers, both within our network and the larger movement.
There’s still a lot of ground to cover
We’re currently exploring opportunities to pilot Daybreaker Network in Mexico and other parts of the world, but we believe that this kind of movement infrastructure is critical for robust civil society and social movements everywhere. Do you agree?
Get in touch to learn more, get involved, and help Daybreaker Network grow.
