Case Study
UC Davis Children's Hospital / PC-CARE Training Center
Built from zero, grant-funded, and designed for the caregivers who need it most.
The PC-CARE Training Center at UC Davis Children's Hospital had something genuinely valuable: evidence-based parenting guidance developed through years of clinical research. What they didn't have was a way to get it into the hands of the people who needed it most. The existing materials lived in clinical settings and in-person spaces. Parents navigating behavioral challenges, chronic illness, foster care, or court-involved family services had no accessible entry point. There was no digital home, no learning structure, and no budget. What there was, was a vision, and a grant opportunity that could make it real.
Studio Lyko had worked with PC-CARE since 2017, starting with updated print materials and a new logo. When they came to us in 2021 asking to build something entirely new — a free online learning center that could serve caregivers anywhere — we built a proposal encompassing their goals and the means to accomplish them. That proposal helped PC-CARE secure two grants totaling approximately $100,000. Then the real work began.
The PC-CARE Learning Center is not just a parenting website. It's a place of belonging. The homepage drops users into an urban garden, an environment of community and growth, where families from the neighborhood serve as guides. Fourteen original characters, illustrated to reflect a wide range of family structures, cultures, and caregiving relationships, are grouped into seven lessons. Each lesson leads caregivers through PC-CARE's core skills with warmth, clarity, and depth.
Thirty-seven plants, each with their own name and backstory, represent the thirty-seven topics and skills available throughout the site — while adding whimsy and warmth to the experience. Users can navigate by behavior, by goal, or by lesson, entering from wherever they are and moving at their own pace. The experience is designed to feel less like a course and more like a community you return to. The entire platform is built in WordPress using Elementor, LearnDash, and WPML, and is translated into Spanish, with Dari/Farsi in progress.
The design challenge was how to translate rigorous clinical research into something a parent exhausted at 10pm could actually sit with and use. Every visual, character, name, and navigation choice had to earn its place against that question. This was a technically complex site that required fluency with Elementor, LearnDash, and WPML simultaneously. When the project's development path changed significantly mid-course, we rebuilt the approach without rebuilding the timeline or the client's trust.
Cultural sensitivity and language access weren't afterthoughts. They were deeply explored and integrated from the foundation up. We worked with the client and collaborators to ensure that character names, colloquial phrases, and embedded media all reflected the communities the platform was built to serve.
The PC-CARE Learning Center is endorsed by NCTSN and SAMHSA and lives as a standalone resource available to anyone, anywhere, for free. More than that, it is something that didn't exist before. There was no model for this kind of platform in the parenting therapy and research space. We paved the road and then walked it. The world we made with PC-CARE — the story, the characters, the garden, and the feeling the experience evokes — respects the intelligence and the real difficulty of being a caregiver, and it invites people in rather than talking down to them.