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Service Design Portfolio
Human-Centered Design at Scale with the YMCA of the USA
As a people and culture experts at Design for America, I co-developed the Performance and Development structures for the team. In addition, I lead the improvement of quarterly all-team meetups for professional development, job crafting, and teaming.
The objectives of this partnership were to:
- Build capacity for various stakeholders, including YMCA Youth Changemakers learning design thinking, DFA students developing leadership and professional skills, and YMCA staff facilitating design thinking and engaging changemakers programming.
- Expand upon the collaborative work DFA and YMCA had undertaken over the previous three years, focusing on long-term growth opportunities—specifically youth empowerment—through a structured 1/3/5 academic year timeline.
Capacity Building
This long-term initiative centered on disseminating, scaling, and implementing social-impact design capacities for YMCA changemakers, staff, and DFA students.
The partnership culminated in a multi-year project: Voices of the Future: Workshopping a Youth-Centered Tomorrow. Through this initiative, DFA studios collaborated with local YMCAs to co-develop programs and initiatives aimed at re-engaging YMCA’s declining youth population.
As part of this effort, DFA Studios spent a year exploring and validating methods to engage young people at the YMCA. They used and taught the design process to help build confidence and skills as changemakers. A key question driving this work was: How can young people respectfully and equitably engage with the communities they are a part of?
DFA staff supported DFA studios in applying the HCD process while addressing the question: How might we build a community space that empowers YMCA youth to take action on meaningful issues? After months of discovery, research, and feedback, the DFA UC San Diego studio partnered with its local YMCA to prototype an annual Changemaker Summit and a yearly mentorship program. These initiatives were designed with desirability, feasibility, and viability at their core, ensuring alignment with various stakeholders' needs and capacities.
This partnership inspired the YMCA’s Be A Changemaker project, which sponsored high school students to propose, test, and implement projects addressing critical issues in their communities.
Expanding Impact
Building on the previous years of learning and programming, the final year of the partnership featured 12 nationwide workshops between DFA students and local YMCA youth. These workshops refined programming opportunities and aligned organizational values with the needs of young participants. In many sessions, DFA students co-facilitated discussions, fostering an environment where YMCA youth felt comfortable, empowered, and uninhibited in expressing their experiences and ideas.
Driving Questions Included:
- What should the YMCA consider when designing community spaces that are safe, affirming, enjoyable, and supportive of young people’s goals, concerns, and dreams?
- What issues do you want to help address in your community? (Examples: climate change, houselessness, hunger, segregation, etc.)
- How can youth-focused community programming spaces (like the YMCA) equip and resource young people to take action on the issues that matter most to them?
- Engage diverse youth voices: Invite young people (ages 14-25) into workshop spaces to share their experiences and perspectives on the types of programming they want to see in their communities.
- Identify key opportunity areas: Synthesize workshop insights to highlight 4-5 key recommendations for the YMCA to consider in designing youth programming spaces.
- Build relationships with youth audiences: Establish collaborative bridges and trusting relationships between DFA studios and youth-serving organizations in their local communities.
From these workshops, we synthesized hundreds of data points to identify core themes and actionable strategies. These insights informed both local and national YMCA initiatives and contributed to the YMCA’s 10-year strategic growth plan. Additionally, this work influenced the YMCA Changemakers Project, a national summit supporting YMCA changemakers and their community-driven projects across the country.