9 months, 6 teams, 7 solutions

9-months isn’t just the human gestation period. It’s also been the solution gestation period. For a good 270 days and nights, we’ve were hard at work building a partnership, a core design team, and 6 staff-led teams. All so we could learn how to help social service providers carve out the time, space, and methodology for service development – for making new kinds of supports with the people they serve, their families, and frontline workers.

You see, social service providers the world over are paid to implement preset contracts. They are resourced to deliver a certain number of hours of support each week, month, and year. Traditionally, there has been no leeway to re-think what those hours of support look like, and what they actually add up to.

Imagine if Google or Facebook or Twitter or Starbucks or McDonald’s had no resource to refresh their services. If they could only deliver the same thing day after day, without any improvements or new features or new menus?  Where most private sector companies spend at least 3% of their budgets on Research & Development, there is no equivalent in the social services sector.

We’re trying to change that. Starting in November 2014, we began a first prototype of a Research & Development infrastructure, The Fifth Space, between three of British Columbia’s bigger disability service providers. At the same time, we began modeling how to prototype by taking one of our ideas on paper to a small-scale adult learning platform. That platform, Kudoz, activated 130 hours of community time in just 3-months and helped shift how adults with a developmental disability see themselves and their future.