Expanding opportunites for diverse tech talent
Opportunity Fund at General Assembly
Type of Project:
Service Design | Change Management | Storytelling | Education | Workforce Development
Challenge:
Redesign admissions and selection process for full-tuition scholarships to General Assembly's immersive courses and drive adoption of scholarship program across 15 global markets.
Context:
When I joined the social impact team at General Assembly, in 2015, the diversity in tech conversation was just beginning to gather steam. As the leading 21st century educator and the first in the industry to offer scholarships for diverse students General Assembly was well positioned to expand its leadership into diversity and access, but despite awareness and demand for scholarships many scholarships were going unused.
Research:
As an insider within the organization transitioning from a role on a local admissions team to the global social impact team, I began the project with an understanding of who the key stakeholders were and first-hand knowledge of the frustrations that I encountered as an admissions counselor working with the Opportunity Fund. To test my hypotheses as to what was wrong and ensure that I designed solutions based on perspectives beyond my own I assembled a task force of employees from all over the company including people who interacted with the program regularly and those who had never touched it. Additionally, I conducted 1:1 interviews with admissions counselors in markets of different sizes and maturity, a needs assessment with admissions leadership and the general manager of the campus education. Using the service blueprint as the driving tool I mapped the existing process of scholarship admission and selection and the ideal future state.
Insights:
Ease of use, predictability, speed, and better aligned metrics were key to driving adoption of the Opportunity Fund. As I got to know the various stakeholders better it became clear that most people were fully bought into the spirit of the Opportunity Fund, but the cumbersome application and selection process and the low odds of a student being awarded a scholarship discouraged them from engaging in the process. Admissions counselors and managers, as well as regional and executive leadership love serving students, but they have to maintain their focus on revenue targets. Every day spent waiting to find out if a student has been awarded a scholarship lowers their likelihood of enrolling as they lose interest while they wait. Excessive wait time with limited communication undoes the many months of relationship-building that admissions counselors had already done with students. Given the frustration in communicating scholarships and the limited return on educating potential students about scholarships some admissions counselors opted to only publicize scholarships when students asked directly about them.
Impact:
We centered the redesign of the admissions and selection process around the key insight that admissions counselors, leadership, and key stakeholders needed accurate, predictable information with which to manage the admissions pipelines and their enrollment metrics. Starting from this insight my team built a dashboard of all scholarship applicants to offer admissions counselors visibility into students' award statuses at all times, began providing local markets with expected allocations of scholarships at the start of every quarter to improve their planning and ability to predict their numbers, moved to a rolling award process so that local teams never had to wait longer than a week to find out whether or not a student would be awarded a scholarship.
Designed and socialized a new easy-to-understand criteria for determining scholarship awards called "the thrive test," asking regardless of starting circumstances is the potential recipient set up to thrive without this award at this time.
The Opportunity Fund has expanded to all GA campuses, with new campuses building it into their launch strategies and staff trainings.
Over 200 students have been served by the Opportunity Fund.
The Opportunity Fund has become a media darling and provided a stable foundation from which General Assembly has been able to build a very robust suite of social impact offerings.
The insights from the task force were used to shape General Assembly's official perspective on diversity.
Role:
I was the lead on this project managing all stages of the design process from early research through implementation and iteration. I was the global point person on the project both internally and externally including managing the implementation side of some of our largest donor relationships. I collaborated with my colleagues on the social impact team at General Assembly to make these changes happen.
Partners:
Internal: admissions, program management, education, social impact and executive leadership teams
External: Year Up, Per Scholas, Hack the Hood, Adobe, Capital One, AT&T
Helping immigrants to be seen as individuals during an era of fearful homogeneous rhetoric
UNSPOKEN : Stories About Life After Immigrating
Type of Project:
Experience Design | Exhibit Design | Event Design | Pop-Up Exhibit | Community | Urban Revitalization
Challenge:
Produce a week-long pop-up event to engage with the question "On borders, immigration and emigration: How might we break down boundaries and foster connection?" and activate a vacant NYC storefront.
Context:
During the 2016 United States presidential campaign immigration was a major agenda topic. Very aware of the increased need for spaces for civil person-to-person conversations amongst the fear and tension, miLES, selected immigration as the topic for its spring 2016 DoTank community design project.
Research:
We interviewed a wide range of Americans for this project ranging from those who self-identified as immigrants, the children of immigrants, part of a lineage of immigrants from generations back to those who identified as "not an immigrant." We placed extra weight on free-flowing long-form ethnographic interviews so that we could give our subjects the opportunity to tell their own stories. We wanted to learn the right vocabulary to use for complicated legal statuses and families navigating the challenges that those bring before we expanded the conversation to public venues. Once we began prototyping we took our prototypes out into pubic squares and parks to learn what the right hook to get people to engage with our artifacts was. We used real-time intercepts to gather feedback from test users. We learned about exhibit design by taking a number of very meta design-field trips to museums to analyze the design choices that had been made by those institutions.
Key Insights:
At the outset of the project one of the major questions hanging in the air was, "who are we designing this exhibit for?" As we got to know more and more immigrants we found that so many of them were "dying to speak," and to be able to express their experiences in their own words. Many immigrants expressed a desire to be able to differentiate themselves from the mass of faceless immigrants bring discussed in the news. They wanted to tell their own stories as individuals and prove that they were in fact good people. Additionally many immigrants wanted the opportunity to share immigration stories with one another or opportunities to breathe a sigh of relief and speak openly about their immigration struggles without worrying about who is listening, both due to safety and social concerns.
We dug into trends around people's different immigration statuses, but ultimately decided not to include any mention of immigration status in public deliverables out of respect for the safety of our interviewees and the risk that they were taking by sharing their stories with us.
Impact:
Based on our insights we designed programming – both live and asynchronous – that allowed various entry points based on visitor's immigration status, and willingness and interest to engage with the experience. Our evening performances were designed more for existing groups of immigrants, than non-immigrants, but were open to everyone. The pop-up included a short manifesto for listening and engaging with immigrants, a tiled history walk dismantling faulty "facts" around immigration, advice cards to and from immigrants, a conversation corner, and live polling events.
200+ people engaged in conversations around immigration.
Nearly 10 in-person live events with 1 to 2 events per day.
Positive qualitative metrics around engagement
Multiple nights of staying open later than stated hours
Role:
During this project we all shared roles as a project manager, researcher, designer, and event producer. Specifically within the group of 5 designers that I worked with I often took on the role of facilitator during group work sessions helping to mediate conflicts, ensuring that work kept moving along, and gut-checking the feasibility of timelines outlined throughout the project.
Partners:
The Tenement Museum, miLES, Foosa, Design for America, Round K Cafe, Makeshift
Learn more: [here] and [here].
Restoring trust in school leadership after years of excessive turnover
Model UN at American School of Tangier
Type of Project:
Program Design | Curriculum Development | Change Management | Education
Challenge:
Develop and launch a Model UN program for AST high schoolers from scratch during the remaining half of the academic year.
Context:
When I joined the American School of Tangier parents, students, and staff were distrustful of the school's leadership team because they were the third team to come into the school within five years taking up the quest to try to fill the shoes left by the passing of an iconic headmaster. Everyone involved, the new leadership team included worried that AST's well-respected storied past was eroded and that the school's reputation was at risk as disorganization and stalled innovation started to become the norm. Launching a Model UN program was identified as a strategic priority for the school during the 2012-2013 school year as a pubic win that could both help the school to catch up to its peer institutions and a way to win parents back on board.
Research:
Once assigned to this project in December, with a launch target just a few short months down the line, I started hopping on trains to visit any and every Model UN conference in Morocco and building relationships with the event organizers and other faculty and staff. Through the information shared from the informal network that I was able to structure the curriculum and then take feedback from the history teacher about what was helping and not helping students. I also leveraged personal relationships with people who had built Model UN programs or led teams in the past and was unafraid to call the help hotline when I felt like I needed it. Beyond designing the curriculum and managing the logistics of chaperoning under age students the project hinged on stakeholder engagement incl. holding one-on-one calls with the parent liaisons and small town-firm actitivies.
Key Insights:
Parents, students, and teachers had been disappointed by interim organizations one too many time to trust again. Given the low level of confidence in the administration parents shielded their children from disappointment by not letting them get excited about school-sponsored offerings anymore. Given high turnover, staff and faculty are no longer excited about collaborating on new ideas to make the school better because the turnover that they see at all levels leads them to believe that anyone who they start working with will probably be gone before they finish the collaboration.
Impact
In less than 4 months, I successfully launched the Model UN program, in spring 2013 with 5 students participating in 1 international conference. This was one of the fastest launches in recent AST history. I developed the curriculum in conjunction with our upper school history teacher. He designed lessons focused on the facts and trends of world history and current affairs that he felt students needed to know in order to be successful in the program while I designed lessons focused on the protocol of Model UN competitions.
The program has continued without pause for over 5 years and grown in size each year in the number of students who participate and the number of conferences that the school participates in.
In 2015, The American School of Tangier began hosting its own Model UN conference to invite other schools to, further establishing its presence in the space.
Role:
I was the lead project manager, designer, and event planner on this project, but I could not have pulled the project off without a spirited team of co-conspirators. I collaborated with AST's upper school history teacher, parent liaisons, parents, students, the offices of the Head of School and Head of Upper School, and a number of informal AST powerbrokers on this project.