In 2024, as part of its designing for community well-being practice, The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team sought to better understand the reasons why some high school students in Columbus are chronically absent from school.

Through a co-design methodology—in which community “co-designers” with lived experience and expertise join our problem-solving team—The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team worked with young people to co-create innovative approaches to boost engagement around learning.

For this project, four high-school-aged young people joined The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team as co-designers. These young people either were considered “chronically absent” during the project or had been described as “chronically absent” at some previous point. Co-designers were recruited from a Columbus Metropolitan Library location where many of these young people spend their days when not at school.

In addition to the co-designers, The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team recruited approximately 25 other high school students who had had experience with chronic absenteeism to participate in interviews and share their experiences and perspectives. The co-designers helped with the interviews and helped The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team make sense of what was learned through these conversations.

Collaborative design sprint with the Central Ohio Teen Collaborative (COTC) to help understand how young people were thinking about their safety, security, and development, and how they were spending time outside of school.

In early 2024, the Central Ohio Teen Collaborative (COTC)—comprised of Columbus Metropolitan Library, Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Ohio, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio, YMCA of Central Ohio, Columbus Recreation and Parks Department, Junior Achievement of Central Ohio, and AmeriCorps—approached The Columbus Foundation about engaging in a human-centered design project to help understand how young people were thinking about their safety, security, and development and how they were spending time outside of school.

Seven young people joined as “co-designers” for this project. The role and purpose of a co-designer is to provide lived expertise throughout the process and provide feedback and comments on what we think we’re learning and insight into what can be created. The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team also conducted empathy interviews with other young people over multiple weeks alongside co-designers to lay the groundwork of understanding of the problems to address.

In-person sessions were then held with COTC implementers and co-designers. This included two days of ideation, prototyping, and testing the first round of “solutions.”

With co-designers, The Columbus Foundation's Designing for Community Well-Being team conducted additional ideation sessions to iterate the first round of solutions, created additional prototypes, and conducted more testing rounds to refine learnings.

Collaborative design sprint with Food Soldier volunteers to ensure people experiencing poverty can use technology in all the ways they want to and need to.

By early March 2021, Columbus had been hard at work trying to address the “digital divide” in our community. The Columbus Foundation worked with Food Soldier volunteers to identify community members willing to join our design team and others willing to be interviewed about their experiences with technology.

Throughout our week-long design sprint, our team conducted approximately 15 hours of interviews with people experiencing poverty. We asked them about their internet access, usage, and current technology challenges. As a team, we made sense of what we heard, brainstormed potential solutions, and built and tested those solutions with more community members.

Collaborative design sprint with Columbus residents aged 18-26 to better understand their workforce needs and how Goodwill Columbus (GWC) might better serve them.

The Columbus Foundation and its co-designers carried out a week-long design sprint during which we conducted around 15 hours of interviews with Columbus residents aged 18-26. Our team heard the kind of workforce assistance these young people desired, brainstormed ways to provide it, and co-created concepts that might better address these needs.

Following the study, GWC put together a proposal and awarded a grant to focus on out-of-school youth ages 18 to 25 years old, providing them with intense coaching, building strong support systems, administering supportive services funds that would assist them with housing, transportation, food, and childcare, offering paid work experiences in a variety of occupations, and free credentialed training to help them find their first job.

The youth that GWC worked with shifted their focus from in-the-moment or day-to-day survival to what their future could look like if they had safe housing, food for themselves and/or their family, affordable childcare, and a job that they valued and aligned to their goals.

Collaborative design sprint with Columbus youth to better understand how they were feeling about their safety and co-create potential solutions that might address the drivers of increased violence.

In the summer of 2021, The Columbus Foundation worked with community co-designers to better understand how young people were feeling about their own safety and security in their neighborhoods.

Collaborative design sprint with six of Columbus' largest museums to better understand how they might increase belonging in museums for all community members and ensure individuals eligible for the Museums for All program would be inclined to visit them.

In the Spring of 2021, The Columbus Foundation carried out a design project with six of the largest museums in Columbus as they prepared to roll out a Museums for All program to better understand how they might increase belonging in museums for people currently experiencing poverty.

The project was done during a week-long intensive design sprint in which The Columbus Foundation conducted 12 hours of interviews with people currently experiencing poverty or receiving government assistance. The interviews helped our team better understand how residents view museums and where people felt the greatest belonging in the city in general.

Collaborative design sprint with Star House to help understand what young people experiencing homelessness were going through during COVID and how to best support them. 

In May 2020, we sought to better understand how COVID closures across the city impacted youth experiencing homelessness and what we might do to better support them.

Pre-COVID-19, we understood that youth experiencing homelessness would spend time inside libraries, fast food restaurants, and other public spaces to access wifi and get a reprieve from the streets. With the closures of public spaces and the insides of restaurants, youth were struggling to meet these needs.

At the end of the week, we realized that even amidst COVID shutdowns, young people still needed safe places to rest, recharge and access basic amenities and were struggling with what to do with their belongings while they searched for jobs or were at work.

Collaborative design sprint with Columbus City Schools (CCS) and students to understand why some Columbus students had not accessed virtual learning content and suggested ways to bolster participation for the 2020-2021 school year.

Beginning in the spring of 2020, we knew some CCS students had received devices and hotspots to complete online school. We also understood that even if students had devices, they were not all logging into classes. We wanted to help understand what was happening for students and what could be implemented to support them during the 20-21 school year.

In June 2020, we partnered with CCS to recruit students for participation and interviews to better understand their feelings around school and suggest ways to get them the support they need to reengage with their school work, teachers, and peers. 

Collaborative design sprint with Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services (ODJFS) to determine how they might better support Ohioans to plan, survive, and even flourish when losing benefit eligibility.

In July 2020, we partnered with the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family (ODJFS) services to better understand the first-hand experience of Ohioans transitioning off benefits.

The benefits cliff is the decrease in public assistance benefits that occurs when earnings or income increase. We partnered with ODJFS to determine how they might better support Ohioans to plan, survive and even flourish when losing benefit eligibility.