Plan International – Safer Cities for Girls campaign
Imagined by Plan International, Safer Cities for Girls works to tackle unequal power relations and challenge harmful social norms that perpetuate the insecurity and exclusion of girls in cities. This program has been developed in partnership with UN-Habitat and Womens in Cities International. The program goal is to build safe, accountable and inclusive cities with and for adolescent girls. The program provides girls with a platform to discuss the issues they face and the opportunity to provide input into the development of their cities. It is essential that girls are listened to so their specific needs around sanitation, education, public spaces, transport and access to city services are addressed.
This program highlights the value and importance of adopting a user-focused approach to program development and implementation - for example, check out their video ‘Safer Cities: A Girl’s Eye View of Living in Delhi’ here.
Family Safety Services Hub (ACT Government and ThinkPlace)
The Family Safety Services Hub represents a massive change in the way family violence is addressed in the ACT. It has been co-designed over the past 18 months by ThinkPlace and a range of stakeholders in a process led by the ACT Government’s Coordinator General for Family Safety.
The hub aims to catalyse systemic change in the community in ways that improve the ability to prevent, intervene in and respond to domestic and family violence. The hub is not a physical space. It’s not a new building. It’s a network of interconnected people and services that allows for better communication and much more effective coordination in identifying people at risk of family violence and providing better support and pathways to safety for those who are affected. Check out this short video about the hub, or read more about the design process here.
Entrepreneurs: It’s Your Move curriculum
That's the goal of It's Your Move, a program developed by ThinkPlace in partnership with the ACT Government that uses ideas of design thinking and entrepreneurship to help secondary school children create innovations that address health issues within their school community.
Students begin the curriculum by choosing a problem to solve. They research the problem first-hand, talking to and observing the people who experience it. They build empathy and understanding. Next, they work together in groups to come up with possible solutions. Plenty of them. This requires a freedom and creativity of thought; and an openness to experiment without fear of failing. From a large pool of ideas – some feasible, others more improbable – they will choose a few to test. And then from those few they will choose one with serious potential and develop it, first as a prototype, and then as a progressively-polished reality. By the end of the program, their idea is real, and having real impact. The Entrepreneurs: It’s Your Move curriculum has been a stunning success. It is now available to all Canberra secondary schools and is currently being used in 15 high schools around Canberra. Results have been hugely encouraging.
It has even won a prestigious international design award. Read more about it here.
Life Without Barriers
The community service sector is undergoing a period of rapid change and Life Without Barriers (LWB) recognised the need to be selective in the opportunities it pursues to secure a strong foothold for growth. LWB engaged Nous to co-design a five-year growth strategy for its Victorian operations.
The co-design approach set the organisation up for success. The approach was new to the organisation and was commended for its success in engaging key stakeholders in decisions throughout the project; increasing buy-in to recommendations; and creating a general sense of excitement around the proposed direction.
Horowhenua District Council (NZ) – Reviewing land information service
Horowhenua is a progressive council located on New Zealand’s North Island, 90kms north of Wellington. Council recently piloted an approach to review the way in which its Land Information Memorandum (LIM) report was delivered to stakeholders. Council embarked on an exercise to engage their community prior to making decisions. Council’s project team were set the task of asking the community members what they wanted, and started by drawing on ‘relevant areas of expertise’ within the community. Council held workshops with key stakeholders, which included focus sessions with local Real Estate Agents, the ‘older person network’ and the ‘younger person network’ groups. These groups were impacted and/or used the report in different ways. The sessions were positioned as a ‘we need you to help us’ approach to ensure council delivered to all the different needs within the community. Council summated ideas and feedback the findings to the stakeholders prior to conducting further workshops to encourage more ideas. The common feedback from all groups was that the report was taking too long to generate. The digitalisation of the processes resulted in the report being available in six hours, rather than ten days!
Youth Force Program (Nous Group and Whitelion)
Nous Group and Whitelion partner to co-design an innovative employment program and digital platform to empower disadvantage young people. This program is called Y4Y Youth Force and supports disadvantaged young people with high barriers to employment to build confidence and capability by leveraging opportunities available via the gig economy. It connects them with these opportunities via a custom built, easily accessible digital platform. The Y4Y program was co-created with young people, with accessibility in mind. The result was a service design that diverges considerably from traditional employment programs. Y4Y is geared towards enabling young people to access short-term task-based job opportunities online – rather than long-term work. These tasks are the first micro steps on the employment journey and are enabled by a group work environment led by young people rather than a caseworker or a teacher.
Watch more about their efforts here.
East Boston Voices (based at MIT)
East Boston Voices is a podcast special by Peas in a Podcast centered around events of gentrification and displacement in East Boston. The mission of Peas in a Podcast is to unveil the hidden stories of the neighborhood to the greater Boston community, hopefully instigating change among East Boston’s residents. Each member of the group interviewed someone in the community who’s dealing with the effects of gentrification and displacement directly, compiling their stories and presenting their contents to the audience with added data and thought-provoking questions.
Check out Peas in a Podcast here.