T Lab

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Jen Hamilton

T Lab Team: Pre-K 

Hometown: Ottawa, Canada

Profession (when not problem-solving): Consultant

What drew you to T Lab? A new, unique opportunity

Where do you find creative inspiration? My kids and exploring new places.

Who motivates you? A desire to create opportunity and level the playing field.

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Maggie Ollove

T Lab Team: Child Care

Hometown: Baltimore

Profession (when not problem-solving): Design strategist 

What drew you to T Lab? R+D within the non-profit space is undervalued but highly necessary. I also really appreciate that T Lab has created a space where you can fail forward, which I believe leads to progress.     

Where do you find creative inspiration? Fun adventures and thought provoking conversations.  

Who motivates you? Brave people like Paolo Friere and Malala Yousafza and wonderful people like my friends and family.   

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Ben Peterson

T Lab Team: Community Reentry

Hometown: Patterson, NY (or... an hour and half above New York City)

Profession (when not problem-solving): Designer and strategist

What drew you to T Lab? The opportunity to address a wicked problem in need of a new approach.

Where do you find creative inspiration? In the details of the everyday.

Who motivates you? My family, my friends, my fiancé.

With two months left in the program, our Problem-Solvers are knee-deep presenting their ideas to the community and preparing plans to prototype the concepts in the field. At the same time, we’ve kicked off recruitment for the next wave of T Lab Problem-Solvers who will design and test new solutions in Child Care, Early Childhood Education and Prisoner Reentry. Next year’s cohort will run from October 5, 2015, through April 15, 2016.

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Sophia Kokores

T Lab Team: Pre-K Education

Hometown: Menlo Park, CA

Profession (when not problem-solving): Teacher

What drew you to T Lab? The choice of issues and the design aspect

Where do you find creative inspiration? People watching and people talking

Who motivates you? My former students

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Johnna Flood

T Lab Team: Child Care

Hometown: Oakland, CA

Profession (when not problem-solving): Public health consultant

What drew you to T Lab? The model for learning and creating tangible, actionable efforts that hopefully have an impact.

Where do you find creative inspiration? Hearing people tell their personal stories -- they help me see challenges and possible solutions from different perspectives and fuel my desire for equality.

Who motivates you? People who use their hardships to empower them instead of define them.

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Noemi Castro

T Lab Team: Community Reentry

Hometown: Woodland, CA

Profession (when not problem-solving): Before T Lab, I worked in the public health arena as a public policy advocate. 

What drew you to T Lab? The possibilities design strategy can offer the social sector  

Where do you find creative inspiration? Pinterest! People watching, listening to live music, and creating art. 

Who motivates you? Change-makers inspire and motivate me.

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Mansi Kakkar

T Lab Team: Pre-K

Hometown: Chandigarh, India

Profession (when not problem-solving): Social Innovator, entrepreneur & communication designer

What drew you to T Lab? Not many people or organizations look to clean up their own backyard, but Tipping Point is one of them and T Lab is an awesome Idea. I wanted to be part of making it a successful one. 

Where do you find creative inspiration? Nature, people, dogs, smiles

Who motivates you? Peace Pilgrim, Tank Man, Malala Yousafzai and the eyes of people in need I have met. 

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Lily Mandlin

T Lab Team: Prisoner Re-Entry

Hometown: New York, NY

Profession (when not problem-solving): Non-profit program manager 

What drew you to T Lab? My career in the public and social sectors have always been guided by my drive for equity and social justice. My recent roles were as a connector as a capacity builder and now, I really am ready to get closer to the challenges and opportunities in local communities. 

Where do you find creative inspiration? I'm inspired by the nuances of the people I meet and challenge of answering complexity with quality. Outside of work, these forces inspire me to imagine and bake layer cakes with multiple components based on the flavor preferences of the receiving friend. 

Who motivates you? This might seem like a bit of a syntactical subtlety, but I am motivated by myself and encouraged by others. In a way, I feel as though I have always had an internal compass leading me to be an outspoken advocate for my understanding of what's right. I sometimes feel funny accepting praise for doing this work because it never felt like a choice, just an expression of who I am and who I have always been. And I'm just lucky to have many supportive friends, colleagues, mentors, and family members who nourish my spirit as I push for progress. 

Over the next 6 months, we’ll introduce you to each of our #TLab Problem-Solvers, so you can see what’s happening behind the post-its.

Meet the T Lab Problem-Solvers

Name: Catalina Garcia

T Lab Team: Child Care

Hometown: Bogotá, Colombia 

Profession (when not problem-solving): Design strategist

What drew you to T Lab? The time, space, resources and opportunity to apply design thinking methodologies in the social sector.

Where do you find creative inspiration? I find creative inspiration during times of reflection (walks, shower, sleep, bus rides).

Who motivates you? People.

The 2013-2014 T Lab Child Care Team is comprised of Donna Chan, Micaela Hellman-Tincher and Rachael Wussow.

OUR CONCEPT + INSIGHTS:

In the last six months, we met a number of incredible parents, working hard to lift their families out of poverty. Time and again, we learned that finding child care when its most needed and at an affordable price proved an obstacle to staying afloat and getting ahead.

The parents we met are on a path to self-sufficiency and are constantly looking for better opportunities to move their families forward. There are restaurant servers who want to work more shifts, janitors who are trying to get that promotion to manager, security guards, home health workers, cashiers and more. These opportunities, however, are mostly during the evenings and weekends. And even when these opportunities are offered to them, many families have to turn them down because they don’t have access to child care at these times. Thousands of families across the Bay Area have requested help finding and paying for evening and weekend care.

So what is holding these parents back from getting the child care they need?

There are very few centers open in the evenings

Many lack family nearby who can care for their children

Babysitters are too expensive to rely on every night

 Overall, in the Bay Area, we’ve found that the cost of evening child care can be 5 times the cost of daytime child care.

We believe child care options should exist to enable parents to work the best job they can find, regardless of the time of day.

  In the last month, we prototyped an idea that works to create a new alternative for parents: NiteBright Community Care: A Parent Participation Child Care For Evenings and Weekends.

Our concept uses child care spaces that are open during the day but closed at night. Sharing one location ensures quality and consistency, while maximizing use of the space and keeping facility costs affordable.

In addition, our concept draws on the benefits of a co-op model. Under the guidance of a certified teacher, parents rotate as teacher assistants to minimize the cost of paid staff. 

Inspired by our research to date, we knew this idea was conceptually interesting, but in order to see its potential, we sought further guidance from parents who had expressed needs for evening and weekend care. We held a number of focus groups with parents and a short four-day trial with three families at Holy Family Day Home, a preschool in the Mission that has long served low-income families. 

From the trial, we learned that NiteBright had an impact of families. We saw that because children were able to get consistent care in a trusted environment during the evening and weekends, parents were better able to take care of themselves and their families. One parent was able to work a restaurant dinner shift, an opportunity to earn more than her day shift. Another used the respite care to attend a tax clinic, something she wouldn’t normally be able to do.

We’ve found that NiteBright not only helps parents meet an economic need by enabling them to advance their job opportunities, but it also fills a deeper need—it fosters a community of families supporting families as they work together to build better lives.

  WHAT’S NEXT:

If this is the impact we saw for three families, we are eager to see what would happen if we offered NiteBright to more families over a longer period of time. We are currently seeking partners to move this concept forward with a longer pilot.

Our time at T Lab has been incredible, and we are so thankful to the people we met along the way. As both NiteBright and our T Lab cohort move forward, we want to appreciate the hardworking parents, child care professionals and experts who joined us to reimagine what’s possible for families to access high quality child care.

How might we as a community create holistic child care solutions for the Bay Area? If you are interested in learning more, please contact Bryan Malong, T Lab Manager, at [email protected].  Let’s keep the momentum going!

The 2013-2014 Early Childhood Education Team, aka Team Danimals, is Dan Goldstein, Stephanie Mattero and Anna Xu

OUR CONCEPT:

The result of our team’s work over the past six months is Little Scholars, a classroom on a bus that is stationary while in operation and located adjacent to a school, park, or library play space. Little Scholars focuses on children age two to five who don’t attend preschool because they don’t have adequate access. It gives them the high-quality education needed to excel when they enter the K-12 school system. 

OUR INSIGHTS:

Low-income Bay Area families face cost, space and access barriers to pre-school. We found that the average cost of a preschool experience is about a third of a low-income family’s annual earnings, and with the high cost of Bay Area living, many cannot afford to send their children to preschool without subsidies1. At the same time, when families apply for subsidized preschools in their community, there are limited spots available. They are often put on a waitlist. In the Bay Area, there are not enough government funds to cover the number of spots needed, and as a result, 80,000 children are waiting for the chance to go to preschool2. Lastly, even if a subsidized spot becomes available for a child, it may be outside of his/her neighborhood, and the family still may not be able to take advantage if they don’t have time or transportation to get there.

With these insights in mind, we selected locations to test Little Scholars based on income and need:

Daly City is located in a county where 5,000 children are on a waitlist for preschool. We found a park there with all the amenities we needed.

In Oakland, we partnered with Aspire Public Schools’ Monarch Academy. Aspire is a Tipping Point grantee and one of the nation's top-performing charter school systems serving predominantly low-income students.

We found a bus and outfitted it with preschool materials, hired teachers and recruited families. We ran a morning preschool program for three hours over four days in Daly City and two days in Oakland. Our students learned on the bus while we ran focus groups with their parents nearby.

OUR LEARNINGS:

We distilled our learnings into four main areas: 

1. We know it’s possible. For parents, teachers, administrators, and even our own team, seeing the classroom in action made us believe that mobile preschool is possible. The space was adequate, the children didn’t seem to mind, and our teachers were able to meaningfully engage with children in a bus environment. Both parents and teachers said they could see the children developing in this short exposure to preschool.

2. Little Scholars is more alike than different from other preschool options. We heard over and over that our daily operations were like those faced in other preschool programs. Teachers had to learn about their students’ needs, family background and learning styles while the children familiarized themselves with new teachers, peers and routines. In the face of some unforeseen challenges (like a thunderstorm and an unexpectedly hot day), Aspire teacher Erin Cox said, “These aren’t different things than we have to deal with in the classroom.”

3. We learned that children and their parents are on board. This is thefirst time that these children have participated in any form of preschool. During focus groups, parents told us that their children felt happy at Little Scholars, enjoyed playing with new friends, and talked excitedly about the bus at home. One mother, Kathy, said of her son, Hamdi, “He was very excited about attending school. [...] When he was told that he would be returning today, he quickly grabbed his shoes and backpack. He was very happy and eager to return.” With 25 family inquiries and walk-ins making up a third of our enrollment in Daly City, and a fully enrolled classroom and wait list within two days in Oakland, we validated that parents want their children to be ready for kindergarten and are willing to enroll them in a mobile preschool. 

4. Finally, strong partners drive it home. We first tested a mobile preschool in Daly City on our own and learned that through careful planning, coordinated logistics and long hours, we could run a mobile preschool. But when we partnered with Aspire to test in Oakland, many of the logistical details were already figured out for us. We had the school’s approval to park on Monarch Academy’s secured elementary school campus, and we borrowed the help of its top-quality teachers. Most notably, because our participating families had complete trust in Aspire because of their experience sending their older children there, they were willing to join in an unconventional preschool for their younger children.

  WHAT’S NEXT:

Our tests wrapped up just a few weeks ago and we can’t help but wonder: What would happen if a program like Little Scholars was implemented full time? We’re proud to say that next academic year, Tipping Point and Aspire will explore a full-scale pilot with one bus running multiple sessions per day and serving 44 children in Oakland. If the pilot is successful, our concept has the potential to scale to Aspire’s eight Bay Area campuses and eventually to all 25 of its schools in California. We would love to partner with additional organizations to explore this concept further. If you are interested, please contact Bryan Malong, T Lab Manager, at [email protected].

We received help from parents, teachers, administrators and countless other people along the way. Without them our work would never be possible. A sincere THANK YOU to all of our supporters for making this project a reality!

  Citations:

1 Anoshua Chaudhuri, Michael Potepan, “Key to Economic Success in the 21st Century: Investment in Early Childhood Programs,” Bay Area Council (May 2009): 3.

The 2013-2014 T Lab Prisoner Reentry team is Stephanie Chen, Kris Marich, and Marius Rossouw

OUR CONCEPT:

The transition out of incarceration is a crucial time, and supporting people through it is extremely important. Our concept, First Mile, supports those leaving incarceration in taking their first steps outside the gates in a positive direction, as well as in the weeks that follow. 

First Mile is a facilitated, peer support system centered around reducing anxiety upon release, incorporating a very human approach to reentry, and helping to overcome the small barriers that have potential to lead to permanent obstacles. The service has three touch points:

A meeting on the inside to create a release plan.

This plan informs the creation of a customized release kit, left with the inmate’s property and meant to be claimed on the day of their release.

Finally, the newly released individual attends weekly outside meet-ups to address his/her ongoing needs.

In order to keep moving forward after release, returning citizens must maintain long-term vision, be supported in interim periods of uncertainty, continue to build positive social and professional networks, and become masters of resilience and adaptability. First Mile also enables them to continue working on these goals.

OUR INSIGHTS:

Of the 2.4 million people incarcerated, 93% will eventually be released. Unfortunately, 67% of them will recidivate, which means that they will be re-incarcerated before their probation or parole period is up. However, many of these people are ready to change—they hope to never go back. They want to get jobs, support their families and be productive members of society. Their immediate challenge is in leaving the facility, making it through the potential 72-hour window before meeting with probation, and in the first few weeks out. Longer-term challenges can include things like finding work and reuniting with family.

There are many unknowns that come with reintegrating back into to society, and those circumstances can seem overwhelming at an already vulnerable time. When things are stressful, it’s human nature to fall back on familiar habits and coping mechanisms. With this population, those familiarities are often the things that got them in trouble in the first place. In addition, the consequences of failure are far more dire than for others in our society. Seemingly small slip-ups, like missing a probation meeting, can be devastating and land them back in jail.  

It’s obvious that a reentry solution is not one-size-fits-all. Each returning citizen has unique needs, constraints, and opportunities. At the moment, there are many government, community and non-profit organizations working hard to support people in this transition: a small subset of the soon-to-be released get comprehensive services that begin before they are released; a majority are able to access some services after release via their probation officer; still, some have no probation and are left to navigate all on their own. Employment and housing are two important components in one’s transition, but as is the case for anyone, these can require skills, support and time to acquire. For those who don’t get services right away, there’s an opportunity to support them in the short-term, immediate transition to keep them moving forward in that process.

Prior to running the concept trial for First Mile, we held four focus groups with a total of 27 people, both men and women, currently and formerly incarcerated. We then ran a trial with nine women from the San Mateo County Jail Women’s Transitional Facility in Redwood City. The trial was six weeks long. Over that time, we held two inside meetings, created nine personalized release kits, and conducted four outside meet-ups. Our team of three Problem-Solvers acted as facilitators during the trial, going inside to plan as well as run the outside meet-ups.

At the inside meetings, we told women about First Mile and allowed them to opt-in. For those who did, we worked with them one-on-one to draft a reentry plan, assessing immediate needs for housing, transportation and communication between release day and probation meetings and forming a list of long-term goals.

The release kit included a resource booklet with maps, a Clipper card, service provider contacts, hotlines and customized information (e.g., one woman was interested in culinary training programs in the East Bay). A basic phone was included to call for rides and make appointments, which also gave us a way to contact each person. The gift card enabled participants to buy necessities right away—one participant was thankful to not have to buy underwear at a thrift store the day she got out, for example. A note and release day text invited the participant to the next weekly meet-up. All of the release kit contents, including the foldable nylon bag, fit into a 5x7” manila envelope.

We were able to iterate the curriculum of the outside meet-ups over the course of four weeks to figure out how to best keep our participants moving forward. It evolved into five activities that were done at each meet-up: 

Social time with refreshments, plus introductions to get to know each other as people outside of incarceration

Group discussion to create/review guidelines that set the tone for a supportive environment

A ‘Say It All’ Wall as a place for participants to visually share their emotional state of mind

A goals and achievements activity for participants to revisit pre-release plans, list achievements, big or small, and set weekly goals

An exercise called ‘Cracks and Patches’ as a way for participants to name barriers and have the group or facilitators crowdsource helpful solutions

OUR LEARNINGS:

The first week is intense. Emotional support is necessary and appreciated. Even participants who were hopeful and confident when we met experienced big emotional dips upon release. It’s no surprise that moving from an incarceration environment of high structure and low responsibility, to the release environment with low structure and high responsibility, is overwhelming. Getting a personalized release kit and time to share release stories at the first meet-up provided much needed emotional support.

Plans create continuity. As release dates near, inmates have high hopes and goals for success, but it’s easy to forget about those hopes and goals during the overwhelming weeks immediately post-release. Creating a pre-release plan on the inside and being able to revisit it on the outside provides important reminders of intentions and goals.

Having a say creates buy-in and accountability. This population is accustomed to being told what to do. Both incarceration and probation rely on strict rules and mandated compliance. First Mile encourages participants to create the guidelines for the meet-ups and choose their goals each week thereby increasing participants’ motivation and allowing them to feel accomplished.

The formerly incarcerated have a lot to offer each other, even early on into their own transition. With a community of support and compassion for the little things, participants were able to get on with the bigger things.

WHAT’S NEXT:

At the last outside meet-up, during the Cracks and Patches activity, one woman listed the fact that this was our last meet-up as a ‘crack.’  We are actively looking for a partner to trial part or all of concept. In the next pilot, we aim to: 

Include people from different facilities among current trial participants to better understand group dynamics in that scenario, as well as prototype best practice for facilitating relationships

Include successful formerly incarcerated people in the facilitator role

Increase length of trial period to best identify duration of support needed and/or ways in which successful members could shift into more of a facilitator role

If you are interested in partnering with the T Lab to pursue a further trial of First Mile in your area, please contact Bryan Malong, T Lab Manager, at [email protected].