By The Hand

Helping children have an abundant life

By The Hand Club For Kids began in 2001, serving sixteen students in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood of Chicago. Their mission has always demanded an extraordinary commitment: to walk with a child from kindergarten through college, loving and nurturing them––mind, body, and soul.

Since those first students, the organization has grown across the city, now serving thousands of children in neighborhoods including Cabrini-Green, Altgeld-Murray, Austin, North Austin, and Englewood. The program’s impact comes from staying present over time, with tutors, mentors, volunteers, and families gathering around each child across the full arc of their growing up.

Keeping the fullness of children’s lives at the center

The under-resourced neighborhoods where By The Hand works carry a weight of public narrative that tends to frame children as symbols of need before they have the chance to be seen as the full people they are. For an organization whose entire model is built around helping children have abundant life, any framing that flattened the identity of a child was something the creative work had to actively resist.

That challenge is what shaped the nature of our partnership with By The Hand from the beginning. OX has served as By The Hand’s long-term creative partner across that journey, working together on campaign development, film, design, strategy, and the production of live experiences that bring the organization’s community together.

The question that has guided our partnership is this: how do you show supporters the real stakes of the work, while keeping the students and the fullness of their lives at the center?

What long-term partnerships make possible

Over years of working alongside By The Hand, OX developed a familiarity with the organization that shapes everything we make together. We came to understand how it thinks, what it communicates, and where it is willing to be stretched. That accumulated understanding gave us the context to tell stories that could genuinely represent the students at the heart of the mission as full people whose lives were unfolding in real time.

By The Hand’s model is built on the belief that genuine transformation in a child’s life comes from sustained presence over time and it shaped how we approached the creative partnership. In the early years of the collaboration, the work focused on film projects that followed individual students closely, allowing both teams to build a shared understanding of how these stories should be told and how they landed with families, donors, and the wider community.

As that foundation deepened, the creative work expanded where new ways of telling stories became possible, campaign ideas adapted and evolved, and live experiences for the donor community began to take on new dimensions, all while keeping the individual student and their lives at the center of each touchpoint.

Power of One multi-year campaign

OX developed the Power of One across four years, building a campaign that grew more expansive and more deeply rooted in the students themselves with each passing year. We designed the work as a modular creative system, meaning a single shoot could generate content across multiple formats and years rather than resetting the creative work from scratch each time.

Original music and hand-drawn illustration worked together as a shared visual and narrative language that audiences could grow into over time, with individual student stories woven throughout as a living ecosystem of film, design, and brand assets.

The Power of One was built around this central creative question: what does it look like when one person’s “yes” changes the direction of a life? OX built the answer through the stories of individual students and the people who walked alongside them, guardians, volunteers, mentors, and staff, each playing a different role across the arc of a child’s growing up.