A decade of learning, pointed forward
Three Roots International reached ten years of work in Ethiopia in 2025. For that whole decade it has treated health, education, and income as one interconnected model rather than three separate programs, staying in the same communities long enough for that to mean something, with community members leading much of the work.
Ten years of that produces a great deal of learning, and the interesting question at a milestone is what you do with it.
That question is what brought PILLAR into the picture. PILLAR is a creative, communications, and marketing agency, and it joined Three Roots in March 2025, just as the tenth year was beginning. The first assignment was the anniversary campaign, scoped as a year of messaging rather than a month of celebration, because the reason to mark ten years is everything that comes after them.
The team PILLAR joined was thriving, with staff who write well, supporters who show up year after year, and a decade of steady work behind them. What was changing was scale, because the organization was growing, and growth asks for more firepower and more people who can speak for you well.
So the job was to look closely at what ten years had built and put language around it. That began with months of interviews and working sessions alongside staff, leadership, and the board, and ended in a top-line messaging document: a decade of learning, written down in a form made to carry them forward.
Here is why that matters to an organization in growth. Every year, more people speak on your behalf and in more places: a board member answering a question over dinner, a grant application needing a paragraph on the model, a social post with forty words to work with. A shared document hands all of them the same place to start, so that the more voices there are, the clearer the picture becomes.
It settles something harder as well: how an organization tells stories about the people it works alongside. Dignity is a set of decisions made long before anyone picks up a camera or a pen, and some of them cost you the more affecting version of a story. They get made anyway, because a person who trusted you with their life is not raw material for an appeal. Ten years of relationships are what make any of this tellable, and not one of them would survive a communications team in a hurry.
Then people had to be able to use it, which is different from being handed a document and told it is important. PILLAR co-led a working session with the Three Roots team, where staff and board members practiced donor conversations out loud and got corrected in the room, because that is the only way that skill transfers. The rest of the year went into the communications function as it grew, and Three Roots has built a team around the work since, which is the outcome that matters. A decade is carried by a team that knows what it is saying, never by an agency.
The best measure of the engagement, though, is what the relationship itself has done. Work like this narrows when trust thins, and this one has moved steadily in the other direction. What began with messaging and campaign writing has widened into design, into social and email running on a weekly rhythm, and into templates built so the Three Roots team can carry more of it themselves, with every source file going out alongside the work. A widening like that is never requested. It is earned one delivered thing at a time.
The organization's own answer to what it is working toward is to not be needed. It spends seven to ten years alongside a community, invests in local leadership, and transitions ownership to the community itself, on the understanding that its exit is the success story.
Organizations like that are rare, and this one sits unusually close to the heart of the people at PILLAR. Working for Three Roots is a privilege, and the plainest way to say why is this: it is an extraordinary front seat to profound work.
To learn more about Three Roots International, visit threeroots.org.
