Changing Lives

In August 2022, I joined Crisis' Impact & Involvement team as a Service Designer. And my first task was to review, optimize, and even refactor the Changing Lives Grants Programme, a service delivered by Crisis that was generally considered clunky, inefficient, and unclear by staff and service experiencers.

Useful links:

Crisis;

Crisis's Venture Studio;

Changing Lives Grants Programme.

Who is Crisis?

Crisis is “the national charity for people experiencing homelessness. We help people directly out of homelessness and campaign for the changes needed to solve it altogether”.

Venture Studio is one of the important departments of Crisis. ‘We are on a mission to accelerate the end of homelessness for good through entrepreneurship. We invest in, build, and scale ventures that end homelessness for those experiencing it or prevent homelessness from happening in the first place’. And the department I am in is called Impact & Involvement Team, whose vision is '"create a human centred member journey within all Enterprises".

What is Changing Lives Grants Programme?

The Changing Lives Grant Programme was introduced by Crisis in 2002, making it one of Crisis' longest running projects and has helped more than 3,500 people who have experienced homelessness move into or closer to employment.

The Changing Lives Programme provides grants to Crisis members with the aim of removing the financial barriers of accessing external education and training, employment, and self-employment opportunities. Grants range from £250 - £5,000, supporting Crisis members to access tools, equipment, training and qualifications needed to achieve their ambitions.

What is the problem?

According to Serrena Tanna, my manager in Crisis:

'Changing Lives has not been created with service design in mind – more just making what needs to happen. As such, it’s not easy for us, others or our members to follow. They are clunky and it’s likely there are inefficiencies and unexplored opportunities within them. There is a lack of clarity on a member’s own journey through the entirety of our team offer.

This project would look at taking the information that we already have and building this into a cohesive service user journey that directs someone through our offer in the best way. It could also identify and suggest explorations of further development and/or streamlining'.

Mission:

Mapping, reviewing, rebuilding Changing Lives' member journey through the services.

Mapping

Reviewing

After talking to multiple practitioners, reading a lot of documents, and even doing some data research, I finally presented the above picture, a visualization that, although not covering all the details of this service, can already express the stressful bulkiness.

Unexpected but reasonable, the average application time for this grant is six months, that is to say, for homeless people who are in urgent need to wait half a year to get a Funded or not answers.

After gaining a clear grasp of Changing Lives, I interviewed some Leader Workers, Crisis practitioners who directly help homeless people apply for this grant. I want to know how they, as indirect experiencers of the service, evaluate it and feel that there is room for improvement.

To summarize the insights from practitioners:
1.An agile, user-friendly application form with a balance of digital and paper is needed.

2.Changing Lives needs more publicity, and more ways to turn its cumbersome process into a digestible message.

3.Practitioners are heavily involved in the application process and their experience, knowledge and abilities are important to success.

After communicating with a woman who had experienced homelessness but was successfully self-employed with the financial support of Changing Lives, I found that the application process for each type of grant is different, and the Self-employment Grant is the most tortuous difficult. Homeless people generally have no concept of entrepreneurship, so the whole process relies heavily on the ability of lead workers.

It's not just the tools and processes of Changing Lives that need to be intervened,

but also the practitioners involved and the way they work.

Rebuilding

Pyramid of intervention

In a living system to make real change, any intervention must come from the ground up naturally.
It is always necessary to think about what change is most urgently needed, or least time-consuming and labor-intensive; and then to consider what to do next. It is unrealistic to solve all the problems at once, but at least we can set the stage, and the former will become the firm cornerstone of the latter.

A film of intro

Compared with the large introductory text, the first thing to bear the brunt is a promotional video, which will tell the audience in a humorous lens language: what is this project, who is it about, and how positive it will be. It is not only designed for homeless people looking for support, but also for government departments and other charitable organizations to express the great value of this project.

Before & After

Because the funding application process largely relies on the participation of Lead Workers, and their current working method is to manually input the text on the paper form into their own online panel, and then synchronize it to the company's information pool. This method is not only inefficient, but also inevitably makes mistakes, so we think that the future should be a working framework with more digital components.

Action & Impact

After the forms, websites, videos and manuals, we need to consider a more complex issue: homeless people (Crisis Member) need to write a clear personal statement and a spending plan. Self-employed funds even require members to write their own market research, which takes a lot of time to research, structure, and revise. Can we speed up this long and tortuous application process?

Since the needs of each member are different, and the ability and experience of each practitioner are also uneven, can we collaborate with workers and even members to design a sensible, agile research methodology that can be used by most people to help them define their goals faster and better.