Community Spotlight
Meet Amanda Baker, Lindsey Harris, Sasha Tilliman, and Unicorn Creative
by Lindsey Harris, Founder & CEO, Unicorn Creative
Sometimes support for Rainbow Place looks like serving dinner or organizing donations. Sometimes it looks like introducing someone to Rainbow Place for the very first time.
That’s how Unicorn Creative found its way here. Our story really starts with Amanda Baker, Unicorn’s Chief Creative Officer, aka The Artistic Unicorn.
Amanda has been supporting Rainbow Place for nearly seven years, donating creative services and helping behind the scenes. It’s become a family affair, with Amanda’s husband, Dan, also deeply involved in the organization!
About a year after I founded Unicorn Creative, we had a strategy meeting with our OG Unicorns (Amanda, Sasha, and me). As many businesses do around the one-year mark, we were discussing our brand mission and vision and realizing it needed to evolve. One resounding message kept surfacing during our conversation: we wanted to help small businesses and brands that were trying to do good for the world, for the community, and especially for women.
The next time we spoke, Amanda brought up Rainbow Place. She talked about Nina, about the women Rainbow serves, about the way the community rallies around the shelter when it’s needed most.
Knowing she was potentially asking a lot of us, because Rainbow Place wouldn’t be able to pay for our services, eventually Amanda said, “You need to meet Nina.”
She was right.
From the very first conversation, Rainbow Place felt different. You could hear how much people cared.
At the time, Amanda brought Rainbow Place to Unicorn Creative as a possible pro bono project. But somewhere between the first brainstorming call and all the conversations that followed, it stopped feeling like a “project” and started feeling personal to all of us.
At this point, we’ve worked on a little bit of everything with Rainbow Place. Fundraising pieces, event ideas, campaign messaging, social posts, sponsorship materials, late-night brainstorms, and conversations about the future Youth Shelter initiative.
Sasha Tilliman, Chief Operations Officer (aka The Make-it-Happen Unicorn), said something after our first meeting with Nina that really stuck with me: “You can tell Rainbow Place truly sees people.”
I think that’s exactly it.
Even without stepping inside the shelter itself, you can feel the heart behind Rainbow Place through the people connected to it. Through the stories. Through the way Nina talks about the guests. Through the volunteers who keep showing up year after year because they care that deeply.
The more we learned about Rainbow Place, the more we wanted to help however we could. Sometimes that meant strategy meetings. Sometimes it meant helping shape messaging around major announcements. Sometimes it meant jumping into creative ideas for events like NOT a Gala. And sometimes it simply meant helping more people hear the story of Rainbow Place for the first time.
Because honestly, that’s the thing I keep coming back to. I’ve lived in Montgomery County since I was a baby. I’m involved in numerous networking groups, mom’s social groups, school communities, and more - there is no shortage of people in my sphere who share important causes and donate generously. And yet, I had never heard of Rainbow Place. And neither had my network. So many people in Montgomery County still don’t know Rainbow Place exists.
But once they hear about it, once they understand what Rainbow does and how many lives it touches, people want to help. That’s why storytelling matters and that’s why I knew it was critical that Unicorn Creative lend its services.
A flyer can turn into a volunteer. A social post can turn into a donor. A conversation can turn into a community connection that didn’t exist before.
Rainbow Place is preparing for a huge new chapter right now, including the future Youth Shelter and the search for a new permanent home for its Women's Shelter. It’s a season filled with uncertainty, excitement, stress, hope, and possibility all at once.
We feel incredibly grateful to play even a small role in helping tell that story. And we’re even more grateful Amanda made the introduction in the first place. 🌈