INTRODUCTION

CLIENT: Second Harvest Heartland is one of the nation’s largest, most efficient, and most innovative hunger relief organizations. Second Harvest Heartland works to achieve their mission of ending hunger and addressing causes and symptoms of food insecurity through their community partnerships. 

OBJECTIVE: Our team was brought on to identify pragmatic and aspirational ways for Second Harvest Heartland employees to pull in inspiration from the communities that they serve and turn their DEI learnings into direct action, operationalizing equity work at every level of the organization. 

METHODS: User interviews, journey mapping, personas, empathy mapping, information architecture, concept cards, interactive prototypes

TOOLS: Google Sheets, Miro, Figma, Zoom

RESULTS: ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE FRAMEWORK & INTERNAL SHAREPOINT SITE

JOURNEY

RESEARCH GOALS

The first is to gain a base knowledge of the current perceptions of DEI within the organization and to what degree of importance it has on the employee’s personal work. The second goal is to discover the current barriers employees face in turning inspiration into action. The third is to understand what motivates employees to do their work. Lastly, the fourth goal was to recognize how we can incorporate tools that employees can use to turn inspiration into action surrounding DEI work at Second Harvest.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

The competitor audit looked at large organizations and other non-profit food organizations to better understand how other organizations do DEI work. We compared the companies by:

• Company Size

• DEI Roles

• DEI Metrics

• DEI Investments

• Events

• Tools & Programs

CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ANALYSIS

STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEW

We met with Sook Jin Ong, the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Second Harvest Heartland. The main point of this meeting was to set up communication logistics, expectations, and gain her first hand observations and needs on how to bring solutions to a complex problem area. She was instrumental in the success of our strategy and design deliverables.

SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT & INTERNAL EMPLOYEE INTERVIEWS

We got a list of people from Sook Jin to potentially interview. We sent out emails and scheduled interviews. These folks ranged in different positions across Second Harvest Heartland and their partners. Additionally, we as a group, each had connections with subject matter experts in other organizations. We wrote two scripts (one for internal employees and one for subject matter experts) to better gain an understanding of what employees perceived Second Harvest doing in regards to DEI or what they were doing in their own organizations, respectively.

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR EXPERT SCRIPT & HERE FOR OUR INTERNAL SCRIPT

We took all of our notes from the interviews and synthesized them on a large digital whiteboard in a Miro board. Each post-it note represents a different research participant. From this research we were able to pull findings.

We found that community provides inspiration and working with and learning directly from the community often creates connections that motivate many employees towards action. Additionally, it is broadly recognized that there has been a tangible shift within the organization to be more thoughtful and actionable around DEI efforts.

1. PRIORITY: Employees don't have time to fully immerse themselves in the complexities of DEI work.

2. ATTENTION: DEI work is not at the top of employees’ minds, the pandemic has caused a “compassion burn-out”

3. AWARENESS: Some employees don't know how to apply it to their jobs, or extend their learnings into other aspects of their lives.

4. UNDERSTANDING: Some employees don't know how the organization defines DEI. That lack of clarity can lead to employees not being able to fully understand the importance of DEI work beyond a superficial level.

CONCEPT CARDS

After synthesizing all of our interviews, my team and I were able to come up with some tangible solutions for the client. Individually we came up with ideas, then we dot voted on our favorites. We landed on:

• DEI Office Hours: Which provides employees with a safe space to discuss DEI with a mentor. This also works closely with the “Hotline” concept.

• DEI Highlight Page: Which shines a light on all the great DEI work happening internally and externally.

• Employee Initiatives: Is a program that would fund employees ideas to make a better community, building empathy, trust, and goodwill.

• DEI Action Workshop: A place to brainstorm ways to help build DEI frameworks in the workplace

FIELD RESEARCH

Sook Jin invited the team to take a tour of the facility and volunteer together by packing up sweet potatoes. In fact we packed a whopping 261 bags of sweet potatoes which translates to about 8,808 meals.

While on this trip we discussed the “concrete vs pavement” that plagues many organizations and how Second Harvest is working against that! Sook Jin spoke on practical ways through the facilities design highlighting their mission and values. 

Second Harvest has an impressive facility that is three football fields large, that includes dry clean rooms, essential for repackaging dry foods, open collaborative office spaces, computers available to everyone in the breakroom and client facing office space for SNAP sign ups. A delight that I wasn’t expecting is that they provide pet food! They are NOT joking about ending hunger for all! During the pandemic warehouse employees and route drivers got hero pay, which speaks volume about their commitment to their employees (about 200 employees).

WIREFRAMES

Having an IA diagram is essential in the wireframing process. This helps me organize information in a way that will make my designs stronger and easier for the employees at Second Harvest to use.

The IA Diagram essentially turns into the Navigation Bar of the website.