Investing in People-first Public Health Approaches
Design Challenge // How might we build on what’s strong and invest in community-led, people-first public health approaches that increase demand for COVID-19 vaccines?
Clients // Common Thread, Private Foundation
Project // Strategic design and facilitation for a behavioural design organization seeking to engage diverse stakeholders in co-designing innovative approaches to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates in Pakistan, Kenya, Burkina Faso & Côte d’Ivoire.
Role // Strategic design, coaching & facilitation
Impact // Common Thread is an emerging leader in behavioral design for global public health. The organization unites behavioral science, design thinking and anthropology with local context to design human-centered approaches to public health challenges.
With the launch of a complex, multi-country initiative in early 2022, I was hired to lead the team through a rapid co-design process to help the organization develop tools, frameworks and processes for visualizing and synthesizing emerging findings from the project research and discovery phase.
These resources were developed with a dual purpose of also being external tools for creatively engaging and co-designing with communities and key partners to ensure solutions are people-centered, viable and sustainable.
Examples of some of the tools and frameworks to come out of this engagement included maps to identify key players within each public health ecosystem, stakeholder prioritization frameworks to understand motivations, interests and power dynamics, journey maps to understand social, cultural, structural & behavioral barriers across the vaccine journey, as well as gaps and opportunities for funding and technical support.
Although developed specifically for this initiative, many of these tools and resources are already being used by Common Thread for other projects and engagements.
Duration of Engagement // Spring 2022
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“You really helped us move forward in a short amount of time - really appreciated how quickly you could download our needs and design something pretty close to ready from there... I’m sure we’ll be coming back to your frameworks as the project progresses, so I think you’ve given us good infrastructure as well.” - Sherine Guirguis, Director
