Kara Sanchez

Family Well-Being Initiative

Client: Children’s Health, Dallas, TX

Role: Design Lead

Design Challenge: To shift the current experience of health and wellness toward one that is understood and claimed by families and children, rather than simply available to them.

Summary

Our team at BIF, in partnership with Children's Health in Dallas, set out on a journey to understand what contributes to family well-being, and how we can create a family-centered experience that helps increase these conditions. Using ethnographic research methods, I led the foundational research around family well-being in Dallas, formulated insights and solidified opportunities, then collaboratively developed concepts with families, clients, and community stakeholders. We then prototyped two of the concepts and tested them during the summer, facilitating the families to ultimately be in charge of the design and execution. I moved down to Dallas for three months in order to be on the ground during this phase of work. All of the learnings were incorporated into Children’s community-based offerings.

Details

Based on the understanding that any transformational change to a current experience or model requires time and deeper insight, this work was conducted in four stages:

1. Family-centered research to better understand and define family well-being

2. Co-creation of new imagined experiences of family well-being

3. Collaborative work sessions to develop the capabilities needed to bring these experiences to fruition; and

4. The testing of these new concepts in the real world. 

   All phases were a collaboration between our team at BIF, Children’s Health, and families and community members from Dallas. Family members were the principal source of the qualitative data that shaped the definition of family well-being, and played a central role in the design and implementation of the two prototypes. 

We worked directly with 16 families from across Dallas to design and test two ideas that came out of the participatory design workshops to see if those programs would positively impact the well-being of the families we were collaborating with, as well as the overall well-being of the community. 

PROTOTYPE 1: What’s Cookin’

What’s Cookin’ was a mobile healthy cooking and eating experience that popped up in apartment complexes and parking lots across the Lake Highlands community. Families demonstrated nutritious recipes, gave out free healthy recipe samples, engaged community members in physical activities, and shared information about wellness with community members.

PROTOTYPE 2: Your Best You

Your Best You was a curriculum-based program aimed at increased self awareness and creative problem solving. The program had two simultaneous tracks. The first was a 3-week camp for teens age 11-17 focused on self-discovery, creative problem-solving, and storytelling. Working in teams, the teens identified challenges in their community they were passionate about solving, and imagined new solutions. The second track was a remote version of the curriculum for families with younger kids, where they could work together at their own pace. The summer culminated in a final event where all of the teens and families shared personal stories, as well as their ideas for how to improve the Dallas community.

To more deeply understand families’ experiences and the impact that this process had on their own family's well-being, we interviewed each family multiple times throughout the summer. Using this data, we were able to determine how to best iterate on these different ideas moving forward, and how Children's Health can have the greatest impact within Population Health initiatives.