Building together.

We care for and improve long-standing tools that organizers, NGOs, artists, researchers, and other change-makers rely on.

"Sassafras's collaborative process made us feel like partners, not clients, and their open-source values aligned perfectly with our commitment to accessible, transparent tools for organizations working toward social good."
—Dottie Hunt, The Carter Center

Feeling hopeless?

We build joyful tech to empower people in dark times.

To us, joyful tech is intuitive, empowering, and works against harmful norms in the industry.

Monument Quilt with Force

The Monument Quilt app exemplifies our dedication to creating technology that makes a statement, and that helps people share and digitally preserve their vision with the world.

A sweeping overhead photo of the National Mall with a huge quilt on display, which our app digitally recreates.

The Monument Quilt is a physical collection of thousands of stories from survivors of rape and abuse, serving as a monument and healing space for survivors. We supported FORCE in building a mobile-friendly web app to document each square that makes up the quilt. It was used as their live event app during the time the quilt was displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in May and June 2019, and now lives on as a searchable record of each of the quilt squares. To meet the needs of both a live event and an archive on a very limited budget, we used the latest progressive web app tech for a responsive user experience, and Jekyll to produce static HTML that will last many years without expensive maintenance.

Need more donors?

Your website may be turning people away. We make sites mobile-friendly and accessible.

Mobile & Accessibility Overhaul with Backbone

Making sites acessible to screen reader users and pleasant to use on mobile devices can be challenging, we have the experience to help.

A screenshot of the redesigned Backbone website.

For Backbone, we did a complete overhaul of their website to make it more accessible and maintainable for the long haul. We replaced a stack of inaccessible, proprietary plugin code with clean, screen-reader-friendly semantic html. Now the Backbone team can edit the site themselves.

Some other examples of our work:

Madeline with Seed Commons: Madeline is a loan administration tool for Seed Commons, a national network of locally-rooted, non-extractive loan funds that brings the power of big finance under community control. They support local cooperative businesses in order to build the infrastructure necessary for a truly just, democratic and sustainable new economy.
TEXERE: The Shape of Loss as a Tapestry: TEXERE is a hybrid online and physical exhibition built in collaboration with artist Indira Allegra. The project is a monument to collective grief, weaving personal narratives of loss into online memorials. The physical exhibition invites people to contribute visual, audio, and textual offerings to digital tapestries. These tapestries are projected in the space and updated in real time, creating a living testimony to our shared losses.
Shora: Shora is an experiment in creating an alternative social media network, pushing back against norms of abuse and harassment to instead build community tools with safety, consent, and care. This work is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and is being envisioned and designed in collaboration with Allied Media Projects and And Also Too.
NEMO with the Carter Center: NEMO is the Carter Center's open-source data collection and reporting system. Users can submit data via Android devices, SMS, or from a web browser in real time. Researchers then review the data and draw inferences to suggest improvements to local infrastructure and community health. The whole system works entirely offline. The Carter Center uses NEMO for their data-driven research in various countries and has collected hundreds of millions of data points over the past decade.
Heartmob with Right to Be: Right to Be is a non-profit working to end harassment in public spaces, especially harassment directed towards women and queer people. In partnership with Right to Be, we created Heartmob, a platform for educating and supporting targets of online harassment. Our ongoing work on this project has included research, graphic design, interaction design, and development. Heartmob has been featured in the New York Times, won Netroots' Best New Product, and has produced award winning academic publications.
T2 Coach with Columbia University: T2 Coach is a suite of tools for Type 2 diabetes research. Users receive near-real-time feedback on their meals' nutritional content. Studies have shown this feedback improves nutritional estimation ability, which can be important for healthy eating.
RealRisks with Columbia University: RealRisks is a web app to help patients understand their breast cancer risk. It supports breast cancer prevention by providing education, risk models, recommendations, and info patients can bring to discuss with their health care provider.