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 the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services to identify how systemic racism showed up in the policies, practices, and experiences of those involved with Ohio’s children services system. 

From October through December 2020, The State of Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) engaged with the Columbus Foundation and ChiByDesign to better understand how racism and inequities are experienced in Ohio’s children services system.

This project sought to identify how systemic racism showed up in the policies, practices, and experiences of those involved with Ohio’s children services system.

At the conclusion of the project, ODJFS took immediate steps to launch a new approach to recruiting, retaining, and racial equity training for children services caseworkers via virtual reality headsets to help them be mindful of possible implicit racial bias in their decisions affecting children. In addition, ODJFS committed to continuing to incorporate the voices of minority children and families in all planning and policy decision-making.

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.