TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Leticia Usanovich de Menezes
Shift - Connections for Change was a 10-week international virtual program for young adults that allowed participants to explore the reality of an existing changemaker in another part of the world and develop their own changemaker competencies and project.
The program was divided in two phases and I was a Human-centre Design Instructor in the second one. This was a 5-weeks journey where participants researched and designed their own social impact project with the guidance of the Shift team.
Through this program, the organisation brought to life some of its goals in creating experiential learning activities that allow people to learn from others’ experiences, and from their own. By reflecting on these experiences, and trying things out, supported by relevant frameworks and models, participants gain competencies that help them bring social change and impact into reality.
By completing their journey with Shift, participants walk away with concrete new skills, quantified and qualified by the program. These competencies support them in running their own changemaker projects, as well as their future careers.
The profile of participants was diverse, but they were selected based on their motivations to engage with initiatives that generate positive social impact while developing life-skills that are becoming more important in the preparation for their careers.
In the pilot edition, Shift had 26 participants from 8 different countries: Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and United States of America.
For the Creation phase of the program, we created a learning journey inspired by the Human-centre Design methodology: a creative approach to complex problem-solving. This is a methodology that starts with deeply understanding the real needs of the people we are designing for and ends with tailored solutions that will hopefully generate a real impact in their lives and in the world. We used a mix of content created in-house and other tools/activities borrowed from other sources and slightly adapted for our program.
We divided this part of the journey into 5 steps, one every week:
1. Empathise: in this step, participants defined the problem they wanted to solve and what they needed to find out about it;
2. Define: this step allowed participants to process the information collected in the previous step, identifying the most significant insights and opportunities for design so they could define where they were going to act;
3. Ideate: here, we encouraged and supported participants to expand their minds and let ideas flow so they could create innovative concepts, and then select the most promising ones to put into practice;
4. Prototype: in this step, participants made their concepts tangible enough for testing and collecting feedback.
5. Evolve: the journey ended with participants analysing the results gathered by testing their prototype, incorporating into their solutions what was working, and discarding what wasn’t so they could evolve into a new phase of their projects and initiatives.
By the end of the program, participants had different levels of evolution with their projects depending on their engagement and resources available (time included). A positive outcome was the variety of areas where the projects were developed: homophobia, food waste, pollution, racism in schools, access to water and basic hygiene, amongst others.
In terms of the competencies developed, we used two tools to make this assessment: the NOW App and Entrepreneurial Mindset Profile (EMP).
The NOW App measured the development of 12 competencies, and 4 of them had the largest and certainly significant increases: Empathy; Entrepreneurial mindset; Selfawareness; and Changemaking.
The EMP measures 14 dimensions of entrepreneurial leadership, divided into two domains: personality and skills. The largest gains participants had after the program were in Preference for limited structure and Nonconformity (in personality), and Future focus; Self-confidence and Interpersonal sensitivity (in skills).
As stated above, I was the lead Human-centre Design Instructor during the second phase of the program. A non-exhaustive list of my activities and responsibilities:
. Co-designing the 5-week learning journey that supported participants in the development of their impact projects;
. Supporting the curation and creation of the content for each of the 5 steps of the journey. That included researching, defining, and adapting tools and activities used, as well as co-creating the content that was made specifically for the program;
. Being the main point of support during the participants' journey (in the second phase). That included being available asynchronously to answer questions in Slack and also co-facilitating live sessions where participants joined synchronously to share their experiences, challenges and support each other;
. Providing ongoing feedback on participants’ projects so they could make adjustments on the go and therefore have continuous improvements in their project portfolio.