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Social Impact
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Co-creating value with Lewisham community: Helping youth charities accelerate their impact
The Challenge
Landsec, UK's largest commercial property developer, plans to transform the Lewisham Shopping Centre into an Experimental Town Centre.
They want to co-create value with the local community and embed new community development models that foster creativity and participation in the redevelopment.
Our Solution
We designed a non-profit business consultancy that helps Lewisham youth charities improve their services for vulnerable young people by increasing their revenue and visibility, expanding their network, and accelerating their impact.
My Role
As a Service Designer on the project, I worked with four other RCA students. We worked closely with Landsec's business, marketing, and design teams.
I took up responsibilities of stakeholder management, mapping out the service architecture, experimenting with business models, and analysing the impact.
The Impact
Following the destructive patterns of urban development, where Landsec's development may cause community dispersion, our proposal highlights a way to build community cohesion, thus creating a safer community that develops collectively.
The approach and timelines
Discover
01 / 04
Unpacked Landsec's vision for the project, through interviews and document reviews.
01 / 04
To kick off the project, we interviewed five Landsec stakeholders from business, marketing, and design to learn their vision, mission, goals, and values for the project. We reviewed the existing shopping centre’s floor plans and the new town centre’s designs to identify spaces for interim and long-term interventions.
Landsec's vision and goals
1
Improve London's perception of Lewisham.
2
Increase footfall within the new town centre
3
Boost engagement within the community
Assessed Lewisham's socio-economic condition, through document reviews, secondary research, and interviews.
02 / 04
We analysed news articles, UK government's regional reports, interviewed Lewisham's residents and council members, and analysed Landsec's market study.
We discovered Lewisham's rising youth crimes, its marginalised youth, and how youth charities have been reforming them. We wanted to know more about how these kids, who may be most affected by gentrification, could improve Lewisham's image.
Key insights from secondary research
1
Exclusion of
vulnerable youth
In 2021, there was a 300% increase in exclusion of vulnerable youth from secondary school.
2
Increasing youth
crime rate
29% (and rising) of the crime in Lewisham is caused by youth anti-social behaviour, causing community disruption.
3
Socio-economic
differences
Lewisham has a large ethnic population (47%), with an overall poverty rate of 35%.
Learned how youth charities are helping these vulnerable kids and the challenges these charities face, through interviews and shadowing sessions.
03 / 04
We interviewed charity leaders across 4 youth charities in Lewisham to learn more about the Lewisham's vulnerable youth, and how these charities are helping them reform. We also found out about the charity's business models, organisation structures, partnerships, and the challenges they face. We shadowed a charity's leaders and kids during a three-day film making workshop.
Key insights from primary research
1
Kids are ignored,
not anti-social
There aren't enough public spaces or activities for the youth demographic's constructive recreational engagement causing them to engage disruptively.
2
Charities are replacing a failed public system
These charities support kids from vulnerable backgrounds who need different developmental and behavioural support that underfunded public systems are unable to provide.
3
Charities need the
right support
The youth charities are filling the gaps by helping the kids stay away from a life of crime, but these charities don't know how to get the right support.
Identified an area of opportunity that would positively impact both, the vulnerable youth and the youth charities.
04 / 04
Our visits and to these youth charities, highlighted the impact they have on these individual kids and on Lewisham. We realised that increasing the impact on these vulnerable youth is a good opportunity for Landsec to reach their goal of reshaping the image of Lewisham through their redevelopment project.
We set up partnerships with three youth charities across Lewisham for future ideation, prototyping.
These Youth Charities know how to best support vulnerable youth, but struggle in finding solutions to their internal business challenges, thereby limiting their impact.
Challenges faced by youth charities
1
Insufficient
funding
2
Operational
struggles
3
Lack of
resources
4
Lack of
visibility
Area of Opportunity
To empower these youth charities and their workers by finding solutions to some of their most pressing business challenges, so that they can focus their efforts on creating an even greater impact on these vulnerable youth within Lewisham.
Define
02 / 04
Theory of Change.
01 / 02
We believe that if we help these youth charities amplify their ability to support vulnerable youth, then the youth will significantly be steered away from a life of crime, thus building social cohesion and creating safer communities within Lewisham.
Defined personas using primary research insights.
02 / 02
Through our primary research sessions, we were able to derive enough levers for change across various stakeholders within the youth charities. These insights helped us define our primary and secondary personas, which were essential to drive the strategy for designing key interventions.
Develop
03 / 04
Designed and prototyped multiple design interventions leveraging Agile Design methodology
01 / 01
We conducted various ideation exercises such as Crazy-8s, Worst Idea, Storyboarding, and SCAMPER (to name a few) within the team and with the charity leaders.
We designed low-fidelity prototypes of our service propositions and quickly tested them with the charity leaders and the vulnerable youth, to gain insights on the success and failures of each. Our partnership with some of the youth charities within Lewisham allowed us to prototype and refine our direction away from what may not have been feasible and impactful, by receiving real-time feedback from our target audience.
Scrapped Ideas
1. Community Building Toolbox
2. YAS Bus
Deliver
04 / 04
AmpUp is our non-profit business consultancy which helps Lewisham youth charities that want to improve their services for vulnerable young people, by increasing their revenue streams, expanding their networks, providing visibility to their work, and accelerating their impact.
Designed AmpUp, a non-profit business consultancy.
01 / 03
Designed the value exchanges and service architecture, using various business and design tools.
02 / 03
Once we prototyped our service proposition, we designed the value exchanges within the ecosystem, and the service architecture using different tools such as the Journey Maps, Value Proposition Canvas, Service Blueprint, Service Value Map, Social Innovation Canvas. These helped us dive deep into our service proposition to identify any hurdles and challenges, future opportunities, and potential revenue streams.
Designed service's digital and physical touchpoints to bring the service to life.
03 / 03
Impact of the intervention
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