Over 8 months, fellows applied unique insight and a design thinking mindset to address issues of food insecurity with 6 Detroit non-profit organizations.
When relocating, I was humbly aware that I knew little about Detroit's non-profit community, human needs, and historical contexts which collectively resulted in the specific socio-economic landscape of the city.
I considered it vitally important as an outsider to first listen as much as possible; learning from those living and working here for years, if not generations. This enabled better understanding and empathy for the community I wished to impact.
To gather insights, my team and I focused on human elements central to our nonprofit's operation: volunteers, staff, and guests.
Gained first-hand experience as a Pope Francis Center volunteer.
Duties included shower & laundry coordination, meal prep & service, cleaning, and general hospitality.
Sat and spoke with guests, not as an interviewee but as a fellow human.
Shared stories, discussed topics of interest, and gathered a sense of who they were and how they perceived the center.
Shadowed staff members as they handled daily responsibilities:
Resolving disputes, managing volunteers, and connecting with guests to assess overall wellbeing & current needs.
Out of respect for the privacy, trust, and dignity of guests, my team took no photos during our exploratory phase. Images of guests provided by Pope Francis Center staff or regular volunteers.
Engineers are fantastic problem solvers when given targets to achieve or well-defined issues to fix. But I understood that the linearity of our process-driven training can make the front end of design thinking difficult for new adopters.
Through this challenging definitional phase, I guided my team to embrace uncertainty; leading to deeper insights to unaddressed opportunities.
We had to think differently to create something meaningful.
The center's Chief Administrator holds a PhD centered on program evaluation & improvement and implemented several optimizations to its operation. We observed that it executed serivices and care offerings extremely well leaving little room for meaningful improvement.
Just prior to our fellowship kick-off, Pope Francis Center completed a self-conducted needs assessment study; analyzing its performance, identifying stakeholder needs, and developing methods to address gaps in both direct and indirect services.
The center had plans in motion to expand its operation, building a transitional housing facility to combat chronic homelessness. This investment and focus limited its capacity to implement any divergent changes the team might propose.
We utilized several tools to help prompt our creativity and encourage abstract thinking during this divergent phase.
Now possessing a deeper understanding of Detroit's historical and present trends, I was able to do some informed futuring to imagine idealistic and dystopian environments the center might encounter.
I considered how the organization, as my user, might proactively leverage potential opportunities and protect against threats against its mission. What might we design to enable its future success?
