Bloom Works’ Social Impact Designer, Alyson Fraser Diaz, recently sat down with Community Up Founder, Jermeen Sherman, to discuss the emerging field of social impact design and share how their work aims to keep community members at the center of the design process. Watch a recording of their conversation to better understand the principles of social impact design, learn about several tools Alyson and Jermeen use in their work, and hear examples of how they’ve used these tools to create better outcomes. The accompanying Community Engaged Design Guide is a free resource that your organization can use to begin incorporating insights from Alyson and Jermeen into your projects.

1. Community Engaged Design:
Complementary Guide
By Alyson Fraser Diaz & Jermeen Sherman

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“Design for social impact is the practice of interrogating
systems—institutional, economic, social, political,
interpersonal—in order to define opportunities for change
that give voice to those who have been disenfranchised or
marginalized by design. In essence, this field of study
provides a methodology for examining domains of power”
https://productsofdesign.sva.edu/blog/what-is-design-for-social-impact
-Jennifer Rittner

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Community Up is a social impact
consulting practice that partners with
community-based organizations,
government agencies and advocate
groups to design, validate, and
operationalize strategic initiatives that
improve well-being and life outcomes
for vulnerable Black & Brown
communities.
Jermeen Sherman, MBA, MA
Founder, Community Up

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Alyson Fraser Diaz
Social Impact Designer

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Engaging the community is central to social impact design.
For the organization looking to do work that impacts the
public, why is it important to engage the community as
early as possible and throughout the project?

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What are the steps that an organization might take to
design a social impact engagement?

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Stakeholder Mapping
● Who are all the key players?
● What is their relationship to each
other?
● Where might power be coming
into play?

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Stakeholder Mapping: Intro
Materials:
Sticky Notes
Pens
Large Wall or Paper
Timer
As most things with social design, it is best to do this as a group!
Even better if done with people from different perspectives
(community members or subject matter experts)
It can also be done alone but if you are new to the topic area, I
suggest doing some desk research first to understand the field.
Stakeholder maps can grow and change a you learn more an
build more relationships

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Stakeholder Mapping: How To
1. Gather the group you will be doing this activity with as well as your materials
2. Think of all the groups of people, organizations, and entities that may impact
your issue some how. You can be as specific ( ie. President Biden) or general
(ie. law makers) as you would like
3. Set the time for 7 minutes- everyone begin to write what comes up for them
from step 2 onto sticky notes. - One person/organization/entity per sticky note
4. You can either put them on the wall as you write them or once you finish
5. After the 7 minutes is up everyone can share what they wrote- if you and
someone else wrote the same thing, put those sticky notes together

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Stakeholder Mapping: How To
6. Begin to group the sticky notes that are related to each other (ex: Universities and
elementary schools may be grouped because they are both places of education.
Police and EMTS may be grouped as emergency services)
7. Next you would want to start connecting the groups you made to eachother and
defining the nature of those relationships.
● Is one group providing a good or service to another?
● Is one group impacted by the decisions another makes?
● Is one group reliant on another group to get certain needs met?
8. If you did this internally, consider reaching out to people in different stakeholder
groups to get their perspective and add to the map

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Stakeholder Mapping: How To
The more you explore these connections the more you will understand:
● How a system works and who are the people that create a system
● Where power is coming into play
● Leverage points and opportunity areas to focus an intervention

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Methodologies
Once you gather the right people, it is important to engage
with people in a way that is not transactional. Refer to the
diagram on page 6 for a reminder of what that looks like.
The following are a few examples of activities that can be
done with participants to understand their lived experience
and envision a new way forward together.

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Participatory Budgeting
Methodologies Pt. 1
Participatory budgeting is a process of
democratic deliberation and
decision-making, in which members of
the impacted/focus population decide
how to allocate part of a municipal or
public budget.
Photovoice
Photovoice is a qualitative method that
uses photographic images and stories
captures by those with lived
experience as a tool to deconstruct the
inequalities and current realities
communities face by posing
meaningful questions to find
actionable solutions.
Community Asset
Mapping
Community asset mapping is a
strength-based approach to
community development that involves
members of a focus population
identifying institutions, individuals,
resources, and relationships within a
community that can be leveraged to
solve a challenge.

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Collaging
Methodologies Pt. 2
Start conversations and
spark thinking through
visual cues.
Participatory
Envisioning
Imagine a future together
and get people to see
beyond the present with
future situations
3-D Mockups
Participants respond to
questions and build what
they want with various
tactile materials.
For more Methodologies:
https://jprm.scholasticahq.com/article/13244-participatory-research-methods-choice-points-in-the-research-process

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Case Studies and Takeaways

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Review Case Study: Through Our Lens — Photovoice by Systems-Impacted Youth in South Los Angeles to learn more about this research initiative and anti-racist social impact design straegies.
Through Our
Lens:
Photovoice by
Systems-
Impacted Youth
in South LA

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Through Our Lens: Photovoice by Systems-
Impacted Youth in South LA
This was a research initiative in South LA with Foster Youth to better understand the unique needs of youth in care
and to develop a community declaration and pathway to decision makers in government.
We used the photovoice methodology, combined with Marshall Ganz’s community organizing framework, to give
youth digital cameras - asking them to document experiences of their built environments in a variety of contexts.
We also brought in leaders from the South LA community to offer training in strategic storytelling and advocacy to
empower youth as change agents. We then worked to develop captions that would provide insights into how social
services providers could allocate resources to better meet the needs of youth and to move toward a vision of
success defined by youth in care vs social services agencies.
The research project was interrupted with the global Covid pandemic and we ended up shiting in more and focus to
support our research partners (youth) through a very difficult time. You can learn more about this research and
anti-racist social impact design straegies in an upcoming journal publication from the Child Welfare League of
America called Transforming Child Welfare Through Anti-racist Approaches and on my Medium page in an article
titles “Case Study: Through Our Lens — Photovoice by Systems-Impacted Youth in South Los Angeles.”

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Child Welfare
Toolkit:
Understanding
the Journey to
Becoming a
Foster Parent
Participatory Journey Mapping- Giving participants space to share
their journey and understand the nuance of their experience

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Child Welfare Toolkit: Understanding the Journey
to Becoming a Foster Parent
Many agencies are struggling with recruiting foster parents that are reflective of the youth in care. We wanted to
understand, what is the recruiting process like? What are the barriers that families may face when trying to apply? And
how can more families be retained throughout the process. We began with stakeholder mapping and preliminary
interviews with people in child welfare agencies across the country through a working group that Marina Nitze runs at New
America. We heard first hand their struggles with finding the right people to be foster parents.
When we began to consider how we would speak to people on the other side of the equation, potential foster parents, we
had to consider how to best reach this group.We had spoken to child welfare agencies and organizations however the
majority of the people they are in touch with have already applied, or completed the process. To reach this audience we
decided to create an interest survey that was shared widely though the working group, the non profit we spoke to as well
as social media and other networks.
Because of covid we weren’t able to do in person workshops, but over zoom we used a participatory interview process
which took the form of one one one activities. People were able to map their own journeys and tell their own stories as
you can see pictured here and we able to learn so much more about what they wanted for the process and their current
journey than we could in a conversation alone. You can learn more about this project in our upcoming report.

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Takeaways
● Be intentional about developing bidirectional communication channels
● Make space to build the design capacity of your focus population by sharing
knowledge, influence and decision making
● Resist the urge to do what is convenient or easy for you- equity usually requires
extra effort (if it was easy everyone would do it!)
● Give people the opportunity to tell their own story and be conscious of
assumptions from all parties (yourself included)
●
●

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● Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment
● Implementing Photovoice in Your Community (Community Toolbox)
● Nominal Grouping Sessions vs Focus Groups (Barry E. Langford, et al., Qualitative Market
Research: An International Journal)
● Community mapping
● Participatory policy design, example Participatory budgeting
● Culturally-rooted healing circles
● Marshall Ganz’s “people, power, and change” methodology: A community
organizing framework based on power analysis, relationship building, strategic
storytelling, and resource mobilization: (1) Identify, recruit, and develop leadership;
(2) Build community around that leadership and diversifying community ties; (3)
Build power from the resources of that community.
● Beyond Sticky Notes: Doing Co Design For Real- Mindsets Methods and
Movements
● Design Justice
● Design Justice Network
Links to Design Resources