Community engagement toolkit and youth-designed merchandise for nonprofit impact.
Situation
Sasha Bruce Youth (SBY) is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, dedicated to serving at-risk youth and their families. As the organization approached a significant anniversary milestone, they wanted to expand with large-scale programs but faced several critical hurdles in scaling their impact.
Initial discussions with SBY revealed that while they had ambitious growth goals, their primary challenges centered around limited community visibility and engagement.
Task
As Project Manager and Human Experience Designer at 15Folks, I was responsible for developing comprehensive solutions that would:
- Brand Awareness Strategy: Create systems to increase SBY's visibility and community recognition throughout Washington, DC
- Volunteer Experience Enhancement: Design improved onboarding and support tools that would build volunteer confidence and ensure meaningful impact
- Community Support Infrastructure: Develop resources that would strengthen relationships between SBY, youth, and broader community stakeholders
- Youth-Centered Design: Ensure all solutions authentically represented and empowered the young people SBY serves
Action
Design Approach:
- Immersive Research Phase: Led comprehensive field research by embedding with SBY's community for several weeks. Our team participated in educational youth nights, engaged in activities like music production and basketball, and conducted interviews with youth, staff, and volunteers to understand authentic needs and experiences.
- Collaborative Design Process: Organized the team into three specialized focus groups, each exploring different opportunity areas. We balanced virtual collaboration using Figma with in-person meetings, applying viability, feasibility, and desirability frameworks to evaluate concepts through structured divergent and convergent thinking sessions.
- Stakeholder Validation: Organized intimate feedback sessions, including having a nice breakfast together, to ensure solutions aligned with organizational goals and operational realities.
Result
- Strategic Solution Refinement Successfully narrowed three initial concepts to two viable, high-impact solutions based on stakeholder feedback and organizational capacity assessment.
- Youth-Designed Merchandise Line: Delivered a complete e-commerce strategy featuring designs created entirely by SBY youth, providing both revenue generation and authentic brand representation while empowering young creators through the design process.
- Enhanced Organizational Capacity The final solutions addressed all three original challenges: increasing brand awareness through youth-designed merchandise, improving volunteer experience through structured communication tools, and strengthening community support through toolkit's relationship-building resources.
Search and Results pages from the Current NASA Earth Data interface
Key Takeaways
Listen Beyond the Initial Ask
Sometimes clients request solutions that don't address their underlying needs. By immersing ourselves in SBY's daily operations and building authentic relationships with youth, staff, and volunteers, we discovered that program expansion wasn't the answer—strategic brand building and community engagement tools were. The real value came from pivoting to what the organization actually needed rather than what they initially requested.
Authentic Co-Creation Requires Genuine Participation
True youth-centered design means more than just interviewing young people—it requires participating in their world and placing creative power directly in their hands. By joining educational nights, playing basketball, and making music together, we built trust that enabled meaningful collaboration. The most successful outcomes emerged when youth had actual art direction authority, not just input opportunities.
Sustainable Impact Matches Organizational Capacity
The most elegant solution isn't always the most ambitious one. While the pop-up activation toolkit seemed exciting, recognizing SBY's actual capacity led us to focus on merchandise co-creation and anniversary toolkit solutions that built on existing strengths. Effective design for nonprofits means creating tools that organizations can realistically implement and sustain long-term.