We work with mission-driven partners looking to take action towards their equity endeavors.
Through the direct application of equitable design processes, mindsets and tools, our partners make the leap from theoretical to practical—and directly embed equity consciousness into their work.
United Way Salt Lake
UWSL is a non-profit supporting networks to create scaled change to support half-a-million youth in Utah.
Client’s Goals
United Way of Salt Lake wanted to build staff capacity to embed equity in their internal and external work. They sought to center community voices and use an equitable human-centered design approach to foster equitable results at the scale of the six school-district region they work with.
What We Did
We led six staff teams through two cycles of Liberatory Design. They collaborated with community partners to reimagine volunteering, school safety, K12 parent support during the pandemic, and internal software training.
Informed by this progress, we created an equity strategy for leadership and facilitated custom White Supremacy Culture workshops.
Outcomes
As a result, the design teams led community co-design workshops, uncovered actionable insights for their projects, and prototyped their ideas in the field. A year later, teams are still practicing Liberatory Design and training their colleagues.
Based on our recommendations, the organization built on existing equity work by implementing equity leadership coaching, race-based affinity groups, and Liberatory Design coaching which we are currently leading. Engagement in equity projects has grown amongst staff, and groups that meet regularly are developing working norms and building a widestream practice of centering equity in relationships.
Obama Foundation
The Obama Foundation is a non-profit that connects and empowers changemakers to create global impact.
Client’s Goals
The Obama Foundation sought an equity design partner to equip their youth leaders in the Community Leadership Corps to catalyze impactful community-led change in their neighborhoods in Chicago, IL and Hartford, CT.
What We Did
We advised the foundation team on the program structure to center community voice and equip leaders to create equitable change. We created custom Liberatory Design tools, presentations, activities, and coaching to complement the community organizing focus of the program. We facilitated groups of over 100 youth in each city to lead their own Liberatory Design projects over 6 months.
Outcomes
As a result of our support, teams sought out lived experience experts in their communities, developed community-relevant projects, expressed an understanding of the critical importance of community partnership, and could better define their own strengths as changemakers.
Projects covered transgender health access, opioid addiction support, re-entry services and more. The youth developed relationships with neighbors and local experts, collected community feedback on ideas, and launched their ideas by the end of the program. Several leaders are still connected to us through ongoing mentorship and have transferred their design skills to their professional and personal lives. Read more about our work with them here.
National Association of Counsel for Children
The NACC is a non-profit dedicated to advancing justice for children, youth, and families.
Client’s Goals
NACC is the creator of a best practices recommendations document that guides youth attorneys serving clients in the child welfare system across the country. They sought to redesign this recommendations list to reflect current needs and increase cultural relevance by partnering with those with lived experience in the system.
What We Are Doing
We have led two co-design workshops with their National Youth Advisory Board members who have lived experience with legal representation in the child welfare system. In these sessions, we learned from their lived experience in group interviews and together, synthesized and prioritized learnings to apply to the project. In addition, we are training NACC to design and lead 3 additional sessions so they can continue co-designing beyond this engagement.
Outcomes
Immediate outcomes are increased engagement from the Youth Advisory Board, unearthing of 14 critical focus areas to increase efficacy and cultural relevance of the new recommendations, and trained NACC staff members who are equipped to run co-design processes after our engagement ends.
Client Testimonials
“Tania has a very sophisticated, conceptual understanding of equity, complexity and design. Not many people do. Deep pleasure to work with someone who knows what it's about. Helps stretch your thinking.”
—Tom Malarkey, Director of PNW portfolio,
National Equity Project
“Tania was good at being flexible, responsive, and iterative. She had a great ability to add tools to big picture ideas.”
—Micaela Connery, Founder & CEO, The Kelsey
Sampling of Client Engagements
We love working with partners who are values-aligned. Here is a sampling of partners and topics we’ve supported.
Columbus Foundation
With the Columbus Foundation, we collaborated on three intensive co-design sprints. Together, we developed innovative ideas to support youth experiencing homelessness during the pandemic, families experiencing the benefits gap, and residents experiencing the digital divide.
Google Education
We designed and led an intensive training during which their leadership team redesigned professional development for their staff with an equity lens.
MIT’s Sloan School of Management
We led a three-day intensive training to equip their business leaders with Liberatory Design as a tool for “DEI” organizational change and focused on redesigning performance evaluations.
The Kelsey
We co-led an inclusive multi-stakeholder workshop to re-imagine housing in the Bay Area with leaders including disability rights groups, local politicians, housing developers, and other stakeholders.
Shoman Foundation
We led a week of trainings, talks, and workshops to equip local education leaders in Amman, Jordan to leverage Liberatory Design to create systemic change.
Stanford Life
Design Lab
With the Stanford Life Design Lab, we co-created a curriculum review framework to filter existing content through an intersectional equity lens and to guide the creation of new equity-grounded content in the future.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
For PBS Kids stations, we supported local station teams from across the nation to conduct needs assessments with an equity lens and design invitations to engage their local communities in partnership.
Austin Independent School District
We designed custom asynchronous and live workshops to equip their Social Emotional Learning staff to embed equity into their SEL work during the pandemic.
Open Society Foundations
We designed and led an intensive training on how to practice co-design including our custom-designed Participatory Design Toolkit. The training supported their legal empowerment cohort working across the globe to support oppressed communities.