Designing With No Map
- Erika Brulé
- Oct 8
- 3 min read
When the idea hit, I didn’t move slowly. I went full throttle.
I was still buried in research—hours and hours of it—but I was also picking up the phone, pitching the vision, pulling in people I trusted. One of the first was a close family member. They were all in, ready to be a sounding board and accountability partner. I needed that.
So I started laying bricks.
I drafted rough versions of our mission, vision, and values. I wrote page after page about what this thing was, who it was for, and why it mattered. I met with friends in tech and design. My friend Naz lit up immediately when I told her about Flip4Good, and her energy was fuel. She connected me to a graphic designer, and I booked time right away. Flip4Good needed a face.
But here’s the truth: I botched our logo; yeah, the one we still use. I hadn’t yet made concrete decisions about who we were or how we’d show up in the world. I gave the designer references of things I liked, but no real brief. The result was a logo that doesn’t represent us, and colors that completely missed the mark once I learned what trauma-informed design actually required. That’s what happens when you don’t know what you don’t know.
It wasn’t only design. I also recruited too fast. I wanted people around me who believed in the mission, so I pulled in anyone willing to roll up their sleeves. But I hadn’t mapped the skills we really needed. In hindsight, I aligned myself with some of the wrong people. Desperation over wisdom. It taught me one of the hardest lessons of building: who you surround yourself with matters as much as what you’re building.
Through all of it, the idea kept taking shape. And then came the moment that changed everything.
A friend introduced me to David, who worked with transitional housing providers. In one of our first conversations, he shared a resource that stopped me in my tracks: Trauma-Informed Design for Homeless Populations. It had been authored by Dr. Sally Augustin and HOK (global architecture, engineering, and design juggernaut) through a grant from the United Way.
For me, it was the holy grail. A roadmap. The first concrete evidence that design did matter in this context. Up until then, I had been circling questions and instincts. This gave them shape. It gave me language. It proved the work was real and possible. That document became Flip4Good’s foundation and north star.
The shift was immediate. David and I began working together. We ran research across 12 Southern California organizations: listening to residents, staff, and leadership about their barriers and pain points. It was clear—this model didn’t exist, and it was desperately needed. What was wild was that some of these organizations talked about how they provided trauma-informed care to their residents. Wait. Hold up. Say what?
At the same time, I had real-world problems to solve. An insurance broker I knew from my Airbnb days connected me to Jack Faherty at Homeboy Industries, and after one conversation, Flip4Good was no longer a social impact startup. It needed to be a nonprofit.
I signed up for a business planning course at UCLA and a nonprofit course at LACC. I crushed both, pulling 97% and 97.2% respectively. The UCLA instructor asked me to keep them posted on Flip4Good’s progress. Brushes shoulders off.
I poured myself into it: more trainings, more peer groups, more Zoom calls. I asked people to poke holes in everything. I built scaffolding by forming the first board. And through all of it, I was investing my own money heavily. That was the point of no return.
Was it overwhelming? Absolutely. Impostor syndrome was alive and well. Sometimes I wondered if people were just blowing smoke up my ass, nodding along because helping homeless families sounded good. But even when they asked about funding or sustainability, no one questioned the core idea.
That was enough to keep me moving.
Fresh posts every other Thursday ✌🏾
Comments