“Last mile” charitable food program transformation
A vision and 5-year roadmap for improved service delivery across the 2300+ member affiliate network of the largest charitable food organization in the US. The roadmap included specific operational, technological, and policy-oriented solutions as well as organizational design considerations to facilitate sharing of best practices and innovation across the network while maintaining a consistent, high-quality experience for clients.
I was responsible for conducting research with people experiencing food insecurity in a psychologically-safe and ethically responsible manner, facilitating co-creation workshops with representatives from affiliate organizations, and refining the resulting ideas into a structured roadmap and operational report.
My responsibilities:
Generative research
Service & organization design strategy
Co-creation facilitation
Project length:
11 weeks
25
Opportunity areas for improving access identified
79
Unique solutions defined across the affiliate network
6.6B
Record-breaking number of meals delivered in 2021 thanks to initiatives identified in this work
Context
Following the pandemic, the largest charitable food organization in the US was facing many multifaceted and interconnected challenges with both its “last-mile” operations (delivery of food to people in need via its local affiliates) and its client experience. Many of these challenges stemmed from the diverse, grassroots nature of its affiliate organizations and its limited ability to directly influence the client experience of receiving food. Affiliate organizations, often entirely volunteer-run, offered radically different services, enforced different rules and requirements, and almost never provided a consistent experience for clients. However, this source of weakness was also a source of innovation and bespoke solutions that had outsized impacts in communities.
Given the conflicting pressures of its operating model, the National Office brought my team in to help define a new organizational strategy, anchored in an empathetic and service-oriented understanding of the needs of their clients. They wanted the new strategy to give them the best of both worlds - the flexibility and grassroots innovation of their existing affiliate network, plus greater consistency and more seamless support both within a given affiliate and across affiliates for clients.
How might we ensure a consistent, dignifying, and responsive service to clients, regardless of the underlying structure of affiliate organizations?
How might we capture and share innovations and best practices from across the network effectively and efficiently to drive continuous improvement and locally-appropriate solutions?
Concept
We began by focusing on the client experience, using insights from research with people experiencing food insecurity to inform co-creative workshops with volunteers and leaders from a wide range of affiliate organizations. This allowed us to define a clear vision for the future of charitable food, oriented around 3 complementary types of food support:
Everyday staples - the foundation for a person or family in need, providing tailored boxes and recipe support for day-to-day cooking
Easy top-ups - access to specific ingredients to help clients feel in control of their food choices
On-demand support - situational availability of prepared meals to help when time is short or resources to prepare food are limited
With these three food support options, we were able to define a set of core operational and technological enablers that would be required in order for the charity’s affiliate organizations to be able to offer seamless coverage for clients, as well as almost 80 individual concepts that could improve the client experience and organization effectiveness across the network.
Work plan & approach
Given our commitments to centring the voice of the client, ethical research, and honouring the federated network model of the charitable organization, I devoted more time in our work plan to research preparation and co-creative ideation than might be typical in a project of a similar length.
How I delivered impact
Ethical inquiry: Conscientious research design & trauma-informed research
My highest priority in conducting research about the lived experiences of accessing charitable food was to do no harm to our participants, first by avoiding obvious risks of harm with sensitive and trauma-informed lines of inquiry and secondly by mitigating and appropriately managing any unexpected harm. To achieve this, I took many steps, including:
Conducting a much more thorough and broad-spectrum literature review to understand the sort of intersectional challenges and life experiences we would likely encounter and ensure that any primary research we did conduct was actually necessary
Beginning with proxy interviews with community leaders, activists, and academics to ensure our language and approach was appropriate and not triggering
Mandating that the entire team attend trauma-informed care workshops focused on trauma-informed communication best practices
Offering participants the opportunity to bring a trusted friend or advocate into each session to provide them with support if they needed it
Practicing continuous informed consent - providing a clear and simple breakdown of consent requested before the session, reiterating it and offering answers to questions at the start of each section of the interview, reaffirming consent at the end of each session, and sharing back notes to allow participants to ensure their voice was accurately reflected and that they were comfortable with what had been captured
Preparing a distress protocol with identified local support resources in case participants experienced concerns - while we were conducting most research remotely, I created bespoke resource lists for each participant to ensure we could provide them with timely assistance if we inadvertently caused harm
Offering participants advance compensation to cover any expenses they might need to incur in order to participate in research (e.g., phone credits, etc.)
Employing best practices around participant identifying information: anonymizing participant data, setting and complying with target deletion dates for raw materials, isolating non-shareable materials locally and maintaining a triage and review process for data sharing
Our client was rightly as concerned as we were about our preparations and as committed to avoiding harm, so we proposed bringing in a third-party review board to ensure that our approach represented the gold standard for ethical research in such a challenging space. While this slowed our progress, it was the right thing to do to verify that we were taking all possible precautions to safeguard our participants.
Tailored consultative approach: Acknowledging the nature of the client organization
My firm’s standard approach to organizational design challenges such as those we faced with this client is to focus primarily on top decision makers and leverage structured communications plans to disseminate decisions across the organization. In speaking with leaders at the client’s national office, however, it was immediately clear to me that this approach would not work, given the loose, federated network model the organization maintained. I actively pushed back against our leadership’s push to rely on the standard playbook and worked with my team to craft a more collaborative, consensus-seeking approach that would take advantage of the strengths of the network model while reassuring affiliate organizations about their ability to influence the direction of the organization moving forward. Again, this meant a slightly slower process that narrowed the range of the deliverables we could produce, but ensured that there was widespread buy-in for the initiatives we proposed and working groups eager to pick up tasks to make the vision a reality.
Systems-mindedness: Leveraging a broader network to drive implementation
Rather than focusing only on solutions that could be delivered by a national office team, I purposefully broadened the solution space to include a range of other touchpoints and actors beyond the charitable food network. In our ideation sessions, we emphasized these other system components in our personas and their needs statements, as well as in the archetypal food insecurity journeys we shared. We prompted participants to think of ways to leverage these other components in their ideas by providing several tags for use on the virtual sticky notes of ideas, including “New partner”, “Adapting existing behaviour”, and “Expanding service network”. When we codified the final idea set, we categorized ideas based on these dependencies and included details on how to action new connections beyond the existing network.