In the United States, there’s a huge and growing civil justice crisis. Marginalized Americans don’t have access to expert guidance to address their civil justice needs–things like responding to home evictions, seeking domestic violence restraining orders, or accessing food benefits.

Frontline Justice is a new non-profit organization dedicated to addressing this access-to-justice crisis by developing and supporting new models for community-based justice work in the United States.

In close collaboration with landscape experts and on-the-ground workers, we helped Frontline Justice holistically envision and shape their platform—from defining the strategic priorities and component set, to validating the key platform elements with real users, to designing a bespoke AI tool for justice workers, to developing the brand positioning and visuals to support this innovative and evolving new offering. At the conclusion of this work, the first segment of the Groundwork platform (a justice worker peer-to-peer communication hub) launched to the public, and Frontline is continuing to build out further planned platform elements.

Daylight’s approach was deeply informed by an initial set of ten interviews with legal empowerment experts and community justice workers.  Based on what we learned, we designed the platform strategy to center on providing ‘hackable’ tools or templates for justice workers to use in their work—which could range from something as simple as a downloadable flyer template, to something as complex as a bespoke app to assist with an aspect of their work. We also prioritized creating spaces to grow the connective tissue that the legal empowerment field needs to function more effectively. This will provide a place for justice workers and other contributors to share best practices, learn from, and support each other in their work.

With the core strategy set, we embarked on two sprints to begin bringing the platform to life. In the first sprint, we created and validated a process for co-designing the hackable tools that will be a central component of the platform. In the second sprint, we created a robust and adaptable brand system that can grow with the platform as different elements are built out over time.

To prototype creating a “hackable tool” process for the platform, we assembled a cohort of justice workers and other experts all working on the same area of civil-legal need across a range of different states and roles. For our process prototype, we focused on SNAP benefits. In speaking to the members of the cohort, we learned that problems most commonly occur in SNAP applications during the verification and appeal phases of the the user journey–a high number of delays and denials occur as a result of issues with documentation and interviews, and many justice workers (particularly new ones) aren’t comfortable enough with the appeal process to pursue that form of legal recourse. Through those individual and group working sessions, we ideated and collaboratively refined the tool direction with the justice workers, and learned what they wanted out of the platform it would live on.

Our early wireframe directions drew inspiration from analogous diagnostic questionnaire tools like TurboTax. Based on the cohort’s feedback, we pivoted towards a more open-ended conversational chatbot to allow for broader inputs and outputs from the tool. The challenge became creating a tool that leveraged the current processing power of LLMs, but managed their pitfalls within a context that had essentially no tolerance for errors and hallucinations.

Our final version of the SNAP Assistant tool uses a combination of AI and traditional search modalities to direct justice workers to applicable policy for their client’s unique situation, and provides them with clear next step recommendations. The SNAP Assistant indexes an evolving, collaborative layer of expert community justice worker insights alongside the policy handbooks themselves. This allows the tool to deliver tailored recommendations that are based both on as-written policy and real-world experience. The next steps the tool provides are continually updated and re-prioritized as more information is added to the chat, and the interface allows justice workers to easily review the source information that any recommendation is based upon, as the human in the loop. Though the core goal during this sprint was to create and validate the tool-design process itself, the prototype AI SNAP Assistant tool it produced was so well-received by justice workers that Frontline Justice is working to develop it in earnest.

In the second sprint, we translated the strategic vision of the platform into a tangible visual form. We facilitated stakeholder interviews, workshops, and collaborative sessions to define what the platform needed to be: collective and inclusive, trustworthy, grounded and actionable, trail-blazing, and adaptable. Through naming explorations, we landed on Groundwork—a name that felt both evocative of the platform’s role in building power from the ground up, and complementary to the Frontline Justice name.

For the visual brand, we created a bold, recognizable wordmark that reflects the foundational nature of the work. Emerging from the base of the page and anchored in clean, solid letterforms derived from the Frontline Justice typeface, the logo conveys trust, resilience, and a collective belief that justice is for all of us. We paired it with a color palette designed to balance trustworthiness with energy: strong foundational hues, accented by a vibrant, future-facing range of secondary colors.

Throughout the process, we stayed rooted in real community insights—workshopping early brand directions with justice workers to ensure the identity resonated with the people it’s designed to empower. The brand was built to be platform-agnostic and scalable. The design system embraces circular forms that overlap, creating infinite possibilities when complemented with the colors, shapes, and imagery of the brand system. The result is a strategic and visual foundation as strong and adaptable as the movement it’s helping to grow.

With our collective deep thinking and design work in hand, Frontline Justice has publicly launched the first element of the Groundwork platform—a communication hub for community justice workers—and they are speaking with philanthropic funders to secure the investment needed to bring the platform and its potential fully to life.