My approach to Social Impact …

I passionately believe in doing good work well. I am also an optimistic malcontent. I’m not satisfied with the status quo and I think we can do better. I believe that this world desperately needs all of us to roll up our sleeves and approach whatever role we play with integrity and an eye to a sustainable future. We can all lead from where we are. This is how I try to lead on social impact projects …

• Design for the economic realities of your project. A strong mission-focus does not mean that your project is somehow immune to economic realities. In fact, your mission will be better served the more intentionally you plan for a sustainable financial model. Whether this is called social enterprise, an earned income program, or a bcorp … if you don’t find a way to create a financial margin in your program, there will be no mission.

• Align on both objectives and decision rights. Mission-based work is powerful and messy. Spend the time at the start of the project to truly align on what success will mean - objectives, metrics, customer experience. Then find ways to work through the inevitable messiness with your team. Governance is not a dirty word. Be intentional. In fact, I think the nonprofit world has a lot to teach the private sector about defining your strategic objectives and linking them to living logic models and theories of change.

• Create the largest cross-functional team you are able to manage. Leading a project that aims to have a social impact requires complex stakeholder mapping. Impact - true support for sustained behavior change - only works when a complex ecosystem of stakeholders has had a voice and feel they own the change. Map the stakeholder and dependency context of your project. Always. Design your project team for impact from day one.

Social Impact Challenge #1

How might we … create more accessible and sustainable social-emotional programming for elementary schools?

Organization: Playworks, a national nonprofit providing social-emotional learning for kids - via play!

Background: For 20+ years, Playworks had successfully delivered evidenced-based outcomes for elementary school kids by delivering in-person programs. Playworks now wanted to scale these impacts to 10% of elementary schools by 2020. In order to do this, Playworks needed to design a new service so that more schools could access the Playworks approach, especially when traditional services did not fit their available school funding, staffing, or schedules.

Goal: Create a new school-based program for low-income public elementary schools, that (a) allowed a school to sustain social-emotional and school culture outcomes at a lower price point, (b) could be delivered by Playworks’ regions within a sustainable financial and staffing model, and (c) met Playwork’s goals of scaling impact nation-wide.

My role: As Director of Service Design, my role was to create and lead a cross-functional design team tasked with the design, prototype, test, and implementation strategy of a new onsite, week-long training service. In order to ensure that adults and students at a school were trained to “do what we do” and set up for success in sustaining new bahaviors, the team pulled from a multitude of systems-thinking approaches. This included: service design methods, adult learning theory, intervention design, ecosystem mapping, user research, sales strategies, and multiple rounds of prototyping and testing. Facilitation included team design sessions, co-design, and workshops/design sprints at key points of the project.

Outcomes: Recess Reboot launched in August 2018 (see press here and here); Service Design team presented approach to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health to show academic mapping back to adult behavior change theory; presented at Service Design Network (SF) Social Impact panel; presented at Capital One’s Social Table (October 2018); program showed social-emotional outcomes equal to - or better than - Playworks’ flagship year-long Coach program. See resource details here

Social Impact Challenge #2

How might we … create affordable student loan debt counseling for lower/moderate income families?

Organization: Clarifi, a Philadelphia-based financial literacy organization providing financial counseling and education to lower/moderate-income clients across the mid-Atlantic

Background: Clarifi was originally founded as the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Delaware Valley to provide counseling on debt management, credit report, foreclosure prevention, mortgage default, reverse mortgage, and pre-filing bankruptcy. By 2010, it became clear that clients coming in for counseling on credit and housing issues were frequently also listing student loan debt in their debt portfolio. Because federal student loan debt could not be forgiven, traditional debt forbearance programs were not effective. One client - a senior woman who had co-signed for her grandson’s loans so he could be the first to attend college - described this student loan debt as “a black stone around my neck that will never go away”.

Goal: Clarifi was positioned to be able to provide student loan debt counseling to lower/moderate-income clients and help them make good credit and financial decisions before they felt overwhelmed.

My role: As Director of Business Strategy, my role was to lead the design and development of a new student loan debt counseling program to meet several goals: (1) meet the client need that had emerged from our customer insights research, (2) create the business case for the new program as a social enterprise so that it could generate income and diversify revenue streams, (3) ensure that client, partner, and board voices were included at all stages of the project. To do this, I created and led cross-functional management and board steering committees, conducted primary customer research, hired and managed a consultant partnership, co-created the business case and financial model, hired first director of the new program.

Outcomes: Clarifi College launched in summer of 2012 to provide one-on-one counseling for families to develop a personalized, comprehensive strategy for paying for college and avoiding long-term student debt.