October 22, 2024
Lived Experience Systems Design Method™
Every child needs a safe, nurturing environment to grow and thrive. Yet, our current child welfare system often fails to provide the support for families in need, leaving them without the resources and support needed to heal, develop, and thrive to become successful adults. The missing link? Truly understanding the lived experiences of those impacted.
At Think of Us, we believe the solutions lie with families, youth, and communities intimately familiar with the child welfare system. By combining the power of qualitative data and lived experience, we create solutions that address the root causes.
Imagine a future where critical decisions – from frontline services to federal policies – are driven by the insights of those who are impacted by the system. A future where children and youth experiences and insights become the guiding light to create lasting, positive change. Since 2020, we have worked with and gathered data from more than 50,000 people with lived experience through direct services, research projects, surveys, and in-person engagements.
Our Lived Experience Systems Design MethodTM is a framework for ensuring system improvements are led and informed by people with lived experience.
We partner with government agencies, lawmakers, advocates, providers, philanthropies, and leading organizations across the country to improve research, policy, practice, power dynamics, innovation, and the way people think about child welfare. We seek to provide the field with the tools to drive novel, practical innovations and create proof points of positive impact for youth and families.
We identify the on-the-ground needs and experiences of those impacted by the child welfare system.
We reframe the challenge from a first-person perspective. This helps us focus on actual problems rather than apparent problems and test assumptions and biases built into systems, project designs, or current practices.
Next, we work with partners to ideate and generate new tools, processes, and practices to redesign aspects of the system to meet these needs. We include people impacted by the problem in designing and testing solutions.
Finally, we share our learnings and data with sector partners and decision makers through keynote presentations at influential forums such as the Aspen Institute and the 2024 CTData Conference, among many others, to help prepare solutions for scale and recode the system’s laws, regulations, and policies.
Through the Lived Experience Systems Design Method™, we partner with decision makers and provide system actors with the tech and research capabilities to innovate and engage impacted youth, families, and caregivers in solution making. Doing so helps create feedback loops for new opportunities, identify key leverage points, and build powerful coalitions of those working to transform the system across silos and jurisdictions.