Client heart set on bad design.

So basically working for a charity, making them a logo. They requested this small brick pattern within the logo, which of course looks terrible when scaled down.. As I am volunteering I was hoping to put this project on my portfolio, but now with this being the chosen direction I feel like I will not want to.

Previous iterations of this logo were much better from a design standpoint, so I'm thinking would it be acceptable to just include one of them instead? I've tried to reason with the client already and explicitly showed them how their logo would look as a profile picture and in other scaled down scenarios but alas, they still chose the brick pattern direction.