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Generation Prosperity is an initiative led by New York City and IDEO.org to help whole families achieve economic mobility by deeply rooting services in families’ long-term dreams, desires, and strengths.
While we’ve understood for a long time the forces creating and fomenting inequity, the sheer complexity of these problems has made the development of new solutions challenging. We asked ourselves: How might we reframe our approach to be truly centered on the people we serve?
We took an approach rooted in human-centered design (HCD), a creative problem-solving process to create systems-oriented, people-focused solutions. This process, which orients inquiry around the lives of the people we want to serve rather than our own organizational or financial structures, focuses on understanding and building empathy for their needs and concerns, engaging them as collaborators, experimenting quickly to learn what works, and culminates with interventions (e.g. new structures, systems, programs, or tools) that succeed because they are rooted in people’s desires.