Insight that move you forward

In the flowing design studio, a six hour long class, we finally decided to go ahead with the idea of Harlem Youth Forum, a platform that proposed collaboration between organizations working around youth. From the insights at Exodus we comprehend that many grassroots organizations were spending too much time writing grants proposals to assure they would have the means to keep the programs running, so they weren’t looking at what the parallel players were doing. Mostly because they were competing for the same grant or for the same targeted community. So the service we proposed would uncover the institutions working around the same themes aiming to create collaboration instead of competition. By acknowledging others’ practices, the platform would show how it’s possible to coordinate efforts that maximize work by creating a complete system in favor of youth. By doing that, organizations would be more likely to succeed, expanding their resources by networking and partnering with other agents in Harlem.

We then posed two questions to guide the process of designing the service: how can we connect organizations in Harlem working around youth challenges? And how can we promote collaboration envisioning a unified and better future for each and every Harlem youth?

We ended up splitting our six people group into two smaller groups in order to work better. Suddenly, the great gray cloud that was pushing us back and making the decisions process so hard, vanished. We finally knew how to move on. Together with Kristen and Gemma, we would design a workshop - something extremely easy for all of us – that would promote sharing of best practices through networking. While Nick, Laila and Amanda designed an online platform where the workshop toolkit would be available to anyone who wanted to replicate it.

Choosing a workshop was the best way out of responding our questions. We had spent so many weeks discussing our questions and how to pose them that there wasn’t much time left to come up with a more creative way to answer it. I was a bit frustrated because a workshop was nothing new for me and I could see that no one was truly excited about it either. But there wasn’t a better option, the professors liked the idea and were supporting us. They wanted to see us moving forward after the amount of hours spent discussing.