Mother Cabrini Health Foundation

A Sacred Heart, A Humble Design

Brand Identity
Brand Language
Brand Applications

The Challenge

The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation is a private, non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable New Yorkers. The foundation provides support for new and innovative approaches to enhance health and wellness across New York State. The Foundation serves New Yorkers of all faiths, or of no faith, and is named after Mother Cabrini, who was a tireless advocate for immigrants, children and the poor. Our challenge was to create a proprietary identity for the foundation that honored the iconic and universal symbolism associated with Mother Cabrini and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

The Solution

The symbolism of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart is representative of the good works Mother Cabrini performed when she traveled from Italy to New York to help care for the new immigrants struggling to find their way in a new land. It made nothing but good sense to leverage the meaning of this symbolism as it aligns with the mission of the Foundation, to help their fellow New Yorkers. Interestingly, there are many foundations and organizations named after Mother Cabrini and while honoring the very art she created to represent her ministry, it was important to also visually separate the Foundation from all the others named after the patron saint of immigrants.

Our Approach

A deconstruction of the symbolic elements — the Sacred Heart, a star, a missionary’s boat and water representing the great seas traveled, as well as New York’s mighty Hudson River, led us to an identity that is unique to the Foundation and humbly connected to the Foundation’s namesake and her art. The identity’s primary color, purple, represents Mother Cabrini’s love of violets. As a young girl she constructed paper boats and filled each with violets, imagining each to be a missionary on a quest to embrace humanity with unconditional love...the same love of humanity that today guides New York’s Mother Cabrini Health Foundation.

In Conclusion

“Our work designing our brand with the team from Duffy was a great experience - the team is thoughtful, creative and most of all they run a very pleasant and fun process. They listened to every detail we provided and even went so far as to take a separate call with one of our board members to gain more insight. They gave us a few directions and then helped us refine our identity into one that is not just beautiful, but meaningful.”