Imagine if everyone had the opportunity to contribute to their community, build relationships with their neighbours, and be valued for their presence.
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Video by Edmonton2013
This is the story of how 3 people came in cold to a social innovation project, situated themselves in the problem, developed a concept, and moved beyond the lab into the real world to explored the possibility of connecting community members through work to reduce stigma.
Dominique Beaupre - Innovator / Entrepreneur
Pachy (Paz) Orellana-Fitzgerald - Designer / Researcher
Zeinab Elbarrad - Human-centered design enthusiast
Answering the Call
In June 2019, the City of Edmonton put out a call for citizens interested in participating in “Prototype Action Teams” for its urban wellness project, RECOVER. It was a simple ask: sign up for the prototype idea you are interested in, and be prepared to commit about 30 hours of your summer to developing and testing the idea.
Of the 20+ prototype ideas we, Pachy, Zeinab and Dominique, all chose to join the “BIA Task Rabbit” prototype and met for the first time on June 13th, 2019, at the first team meeting at the Edmonton Tower.
A lookback
How did we hear about RECOVER and why did we choose to participate?
Project Setup
Photo by TravelingOtter
Before we jump into the challenge, let us talk about how the team was set up, and who was involved in the project. Every ‘Prototype Action Team’ had 4 roles: the Prototypers, the City Connector, the Coach, and the City Support.
Click on the titles to learn more about the roles of everyone in the group.
Community Connector
Nor’Ali McDaniel is a Community Development Social Worker with the City of Edmonton. She acted as our City Connector throughout the project. Nor'Ali was key to making sure we could find the right people and connect with service providers. She reported directly to the head of RECOVER.
Coach
Guiding our team along the rapid prototyping process was a local entrepreneurship coach Sandra Spencer. Her experience working with startups helped us look at project sustainability with business lens.
City Support
Support from the City of Edmonton were key to our success. Raffaella Loro was our main connection to social innovation resources. She specializes in urban wellness and what it means for people to feel more connected to themselves, the land, and others.
Prototype Team
This is us! One of many teams that answered the call to establish urban wellness through social innovation processes, such as co-creation and human centred design methods.
The Starting Point
Photo by TravelingOtter
The prototypes, or solution ideas, that were to be implemented and tested by the RECOVER “Prototype Action Teams” were developed and collaborated on through months of ethnographic research, public engagement, qualitative data, expert guidance and end-user perspectives.
There was months of knowledge and insight behind the “BIA Task Rabbit” idea, yet apart from the challenge description, we knew very little about the problem space we were prototyping for.
At the first team meeting we were presented with background information and key insights from the months of work RECOVER had put into developing the solution ideas to be prototyped. However, it was quite overwhelming and difficult to take in all at once.
Click on the images below to discover what we learned on that first day as a team.
Coming into the project with little knowledge of the question we were going to address contributed to the uniqueness of our journey. Did this act as a limitation or did it benefit our work? Listen to our thoughts below.
A lookback
The benefit of the unknown
The Initial Concept
Developing Design Principles
Based on the challenge description, and combined with the InWithForward material that was available to us, we developed an initial understanding of the principles we needed to include in our prototype.
Hover over the cards below to learn more about these principles!
Meaniningful work.
We learned the importance of understanding the unique skills and value that each community member has to offer in order to provide them with opportunities that they find meaningful as opposed to just finding a job that did not have meaning for them.
Meeting people where they are at.
We realized that not all community members are ready to commit to a scheduled job due to different living circumstances. The solution needed to take this into consideration, providing flexibility.
Recognizing the uniqueness of the Old Strathcona area, it was important to design a solution specifically for this community.
Technology
What does technology have to do with our project? One of the first questions that the prototype challenge posed was whether a solution should be analogue or digital. We needed to understand the technology used by the community to determine the most suitable method through which we would offer the solution.
Drafting the First Rapid Prototype
Towards the end of the first meeting, we drafted a storyboard, which acted as a “rapid prototype” (quite literally!). With the help of RECOVER’s Strategy and Communications Lead, Raffaella Loro, as well as our group’s Community Connector, Nor’Ali McDaniel, we imagined how the process of connecting a community member to a neighbour with an odd job would look like.
Click through the storyboard below to see how we imagined the service will look like:
Storyboard illustrations by Raffaella Loro.
A lookback
How did Renee set our mindset?
We asked ourselves: who was it that we were designing for on the first day? We all agreed it was Renee, one of the community members whose profile was introduced to us during our first meeting.
Upon further reflection, we noticed that Renee was the character that established our mindset throughout our work. Her attributes and needs informed how we approached many of the questions that we needed answers to.
Hear more about Renee here:
Diverging Questions
Photo by shawn
The storyboard surfaced a number of potential pitfalls, assumptions and questions for us.
Would housed neighbours even be interested in participating in a program like this? What fears would they have, if any? What would stop them from participating? What kinds of jobs would they have?
Are businesses even interested in this kind of program? What fears would they have, if any? What would stop them from participating? What kinds of jobs would they have?
Does this already exist anywhere? Is anyone else offering this kind of program?
Should we ask community what they think of this idea?
But where do we start? We spent a considerable time debating which question to address first. Which one of these questions did we need to have an answer to first? Did one question hold more importance than the other? Would the answer to one of the four questions impact how we would go about answering another question?
After some discussions, we came to the conclusion that all questions were equally significant and that the order of our exploration of these questions played a smaller role than the findings we were aiming to reach.
Finding Answers
Photo by Arlo Bates
To find answers to our many questions, we had to conduct research. We valued all the information that was provided to us through the InWithForward research, but needed to ask specific questions related to our problem statement to understand how we can design a solution that would truly benefit the population. This meant that we had to go on a quest around the city, speaking to people to find the answers we needed.
The following interactive map allows you to follow our footsteps through this journey to find answers. Each marker highlights a place, question, or discovery we explored. Click on them to learn more!
A lookback
Joe’s lottery (a.k.a. Old Strathcona Clean)
Creating an app with a rating system? Setting up a Facebook group? Hanging a job board at the Neighbour Centre? All were interesting ideas. However, we realized that the solution we had been looking for was much simpler than we had initially thought.
Deep Understanding and a New Concept
The research stage not only answered our questions, but it gave us an overall deeper understanding of the problem space — something that until this point, we did not have a good grasp on. Finally, we understood for ourselves what the problem was and where the initial “BIA Task Rabbit” idea came from. We had understood what the ethnographic research summaries documents were trying to describe to us. We had to experience it ourselves to finally understand
However, this new understanding also came with a new, more defined concept — a simple odd jobs lottery that would run once a week at the Neighbour Centre, that people did not have to pre-register for, with jobs in the Strathcona area. An odd jobs program that would bring a divided community together, through the power of work.
Testing the Prototype
Having thought of all the details needed for the pilot, we felt quite confident about our plan. What could possibly go wrong?
…. the answer: quite a lot.
A lookback
Recalling the prototype day
What a day! Running through the prototype allowed us to discover several issues that we had not previously considered - and we couldn’t have discovered them without trying out the idea in “real life”.
The Realization
Through planning and running the prototype, our thinking about the true meaning of the project evolved. Initially, we were focusing on the method through which we would be connecting unhoused community members to odd jobs — we were thinking about whether it should be technologically-driven, or analogue. Over time, we realized that the question was not about how to connect community members through jobs, but about how community can be built through a variety of means, including through odd jobs.
Then COVID19 hit…
A dinner, presentations at community leagues and business associations, and more time to be spent at the Neighbours Centre. This was the plan for 2020. We wanted to meet with community groups, such as community leagues, businesses associations, and unhoused community members to better understand what stakeholders were looking for in building a community. Of course, everything changed.
The public health restrictions put a pause on all of our work. However, we continued to virtually meet on a weekly basis to work on this very story that you are reading right now. Seeing an interesting tale in our social innovation journey, Social Innovation Canada generously provided us with a grant to tell our story. We spent weeks recording our experience since the very beginning of our prototyping journey up to this moment to compile this interactive story you have been reading. Not only did this allow for us to pause and reflect on the past, but it made us recognize some interesting “aha!” moments we had overlooked. This experience put us in the current mindset, which is to focus on what community building really means, and how we can bridge divides between neighbours of different socio-economic statuses through different means.
Where we are now
While the restrictions continue to limit our ability to continue working on THE NEIGHBOURS PROJECT, we are determined to continue exploring the question at the core of our social innovation mission: how do we build a community where everyone has the opportunity to contribute to their community, build relationships with their neighbours, and be valued for their presence?
Artwork created by community members at one of the activity events held at the shelter.
Tuesdays at Ritchie
During a brief ease of the COVID19 restrictions, we began returning back to the Old Strathcona neighbourhood to meet with community and build relationships with members in the hopes to continue researching for our project. And while the Neighbours Centre was temporarily closed (which we had previously been visiting to learn about Joe’s lottery and where we ran our own job lottery), a new shelter was set up in the nearby area of Ritchie to provide a place for unhoused community members to stay during the cold winter months. For a couple of weeks, Dominique went to the shelter every Tuesday to hold activities with the residents there, establishing relationships with them.
Again, we stopped our activities to ensure the safety of participants. We await the time in which we will be able to return back to the field to continue learning from community and building community. In the meantime, we encourage you to visit our website for updates on our project.