| OVERVIEW
Through the Innovators on Campus series, the Social Impact Hub brings local impact organizations on campus to engage and educate the Rollins community about their missions. The series includes empathy-gathering opportunities, educational activities, and Innovation Sessions where students, faculty, and staff come together to innovate realistic solutions to a challenge the organizations are facing using the Design Thinking process.
role
Team Lead
organization
date
category
Rollins College
June 2019 - Present
UX, Program Development, & Design Thinking
| problem
Rollins College has academic and extracurricular opportunities for students interested in social impact, but the general student body outside of the Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation majors did not have an introduction to human-centered design strategies; this gap was identfied as a challenge by faculty, staff, students, and community partners.
Over the 2019 academic year, professors and Directors on the Social Impact Hub leadership board brought up the issue they were facing with students requesting easier access to the ideologies taught in the Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation majors and at the Social Impact Hub. Student surveys from various tabling events also detailed this issue; students from majors outside of the SE and SI majors wanted opportunities to engage with the work done at the Social Impact Hub and local impact organizations.
Also, community partners at the Hub and the Hub team saw a decline in impact of the site visit model, where Hub students would visit the organization's location and learn about their work. However, this model became too resource-intensive compared to the number and variety of students who were able to travel off-campus. The community partners needed a way to more effectively engage a larger, more diverse population of Rollins students in their mission.
| end-user research
Understanding this issue as a former student myself, I led a collaborative design effort with:
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Hub team members
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10 students
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5 Directors
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3 community partners
I organized group and individual meetings with the design team to more thoroughly understand the problem from their perspectives and ask what their requests would be for a new program. The design team was engaged in problem identification, ideation, and iterative feedback loops, and together, we came up with a way to reinvent the site visit model.
This new model, named Innovators on Campus, would bring the community members on campus to engage students in hands-on empathy-gathering opportunities and sessions to learn and practice Design Thinking. With this new idea, we sent out an interest form to students and professors to gauge how well this series could close the gap between social impact work and the general student body.
| pILOT
The first Innovators on Campus series was run as a pilot, allowing the Hub team and the community partner to test the efficacy of the new model and learn if the identified student interest could be converted into action in the form of engagement and attendance.
Through direct collaboration with Lighthouse Central Florida, an organization focused on rehabilitation and job training for people with vision loss, the Lighthouse Innovation Session was brought to campus in September of 2019. The three-part event series included a tabling event during the campus Common Hour, Dining in the Dark to engage students in empathy-gathering for those who experience vision loss, and an Innovation Session where students used the Design Thinking process to solve a real problem Lighthouse was facing.
Though every part of the series turned out to be a success, Dining in the Dark saw the biggest turnout with 26 students attending and another 25 notifying interest in attending but unable to due to academic scheduling conflicts. In the Innovation Session, 20 students and community members broke into small groups to use the Design Thinking process to develop a challenge Lighthouse was facing with community involvement in volunteering.
Despite the success of the pilot event, it was identified that the event series was too resource-intensive to run every quarter. The modification was to run a larger, three-part Innovators on Campus series with one community partner and then another stand-alone Innovation Session with a different community partner every semester.
| solution
Through the Innovators on Campus series, the Social Impact Hub brings local organizations on campus to engage and educate the Rollins community about their missions. The series includes interactive empathy-gathering opportunities, educational activities, and Innovation Sessions where students, faculty, and staff come together to innovate realistic solutions to a challenge the partnering organizations are facing. Innovators on Campus events have included impact and innovation work for topics like LGBTQ+ rights, disability empowerment, sustainable fashion, sustainable agriculture, food security, and economic equality.
The Innovators on Campus series has been successfully run 7 times, each with a new community partner. To date, successful event series has continue to grow:
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Over 350 students engaged
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Students from every major on campus have attended
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24 community partners engaged to gather feedback and continue to iterate the model
Fun Fact: I created the brand identity!
