Going homeless is a national social problme in United States. In Georgia, a persoan is considered homeless if they don not have access to traditional or permanent housing that is safe, sanitary, decent and affordable. EMMAUS HOUSE is a non-profit organization in Savannah that funded by local and federal grants, as well as individual donations in order to offer food, clothing and showering to people who experienced homeless.
The number of chronically homeless individuals identified in Chatham County is incresing due to the COVID-19. In that case, EMMAUS HOUSE had to offer more clohting and food to people who experienced homelessness. The rapid growth of needs caused many problmes in organization's mangement such as the chaos of process, the shortage of volunteers and the inefficient of warehouse storage management.
In this project, the core stakeholders includes the homeless people, EMMAUS HOUSE staff, volunteers, SCAD SERV, and Epiphany church. The volunteers' experience is the most important factor that EMMAUS HOUSE want to improve. People who experience homelessness is the secondary stakeholder for the organization.
-System Improvments, analyze, observe, interact, and provide solutions for more helpful systems within the clothing closet distributions and storage.
-Scope out the intended use of the space and provide further plan
-Determine best use of interior and available space, as well as most economical design decisions.
-The community of homeless is dangerous and complex to reach out because it is difficult to build trust with people who always lack of security.
-The resources of non-profit organization is limited that the team need to seek funding.
-The implement of innovation may change the behaviors of EMMUAS house staff, which is likely to bring obstacles.
System is a dynamic and abstract object for the researcher. It is dynamic because it always changes with the times. And it is abstract that many elements play their roles in the dynamic system. To have a further understanding of the system, we described it from different perspectives.
The Map on the right shows the homeless camps map in Savannah, which was creted by Mandy Terkhorn in September, 2020. It indicates that:
The Range of Service
It can serve the most of homelessnes because it is on the center of downtown savannah. But it also results to the inequality of resources. More earlier you arrive, more recources you got.
The Community Relationships
It is in downtown community where there are a lot of hotels, sqaures, historical building, small business and so on.
From the organizaiton level, we know about:
Value-Exchange Relationships
It means that if we want to purchase new equipements, we need to ask money from Epiphany Church.
Possible Support Reserouces
It means that if we want to make some changes of space, we need to ask for permission from Christ Church, and the director of EMMAUS HOUSE.
In terms of Clothing Closet, it involves four stages: Awarness, Receiving Donation, Sorting Clothing and Distributing Clothing.
The workflow of service is a endless cycle.
The workflow starts from rasing awareness of the community of the shortage of clothing, and it receives donation from different resources, and the clothing would be sort clothing (Tuesday), and be distributed (Wedsnesday).
Each stage has influence on other stages.
Each part would have a postive or negative impact on the next stage's activities. For example, the donation process would decide the sorting process.
Knowing people is about gaining an empathic understanding of people's thoughts, feelings and needs by listening, observing, interacting, and analyzing. We know to the stories of SCAD SERV volunteers, EAMMUS HOUSE staffs, and people who experienced homelessness.
For service managers:
Service managers were more concerned with the volunteer retention, and the godfather of the Epiphany Church was more concerned with expanding the impact.
For service executors:
As for the service executors, they were more concerned with the inefficiency of their work processes, with a long average completion time for orders, and a hot working environment that led to fatigue and low Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Tuesday sorting process caused the issues of Wednesday distribution process.
In addition to text analysis, we conducted participant observation and discovered two insights: 1) Lack of a uniform sorting standard during Tuesday's sorting led to more time and effort being spent by Wednesday's volunteers to identify and locate corresponding clothing. 2) The way clothing was stored on Tuesday also caused significant struggle for Wednesday's volunteers when retrieving clothing.
Waiting for their bag is the top issue and the accuracy of clothing.
For the service recipients, we employed an interactive questionnaire to gather feedback on their clothing and experience satisfaction because it would be very struggle for people experienced homelessness to express themselves.
After knowing the context and the people to revealing insights and framing them up, we are moving from the very real world to abstract world of insights, exploring systems, looking for patterns, identifying opportunites and developing guiding principles.
From the blueprint map, we can see that:
1.The waiting time is too long for the homelessness from filling the from to ge the final bag. The reason of waiting is the low effiency of order processing on the backstage stage.
2. Some homeless people got the wrong clothing because that the chaoes behind the backstage lead to the accuracy of clothing reduction on the frontage.
We analyzied the whole moving activities in the physical space and decided to focus on men's clothing room because: 1.Most orders comes from men's needs. 2. Staffs and volunteers spent most of time in this room to look for clothing.
During the stage of exploring concepts, we summarized the painpoints during sorting process and distribution process. We collobrated with stakehoders to co-create the possible solutions and service in the future.
Based on the previous painpoints from task flow analysis, we could
After receiving the feedback from our clients, we delivered the final solutions of phhysical space, new process and future strategy on November, 2022.
Beside the solutions we bring to non-profit organizations, we hope to define the design philosophy: create a efficient and enjoyable to bring more dignity to EMMAUS HOUSE staffs and volunteers.
The team spent two weeks to paint the wall, buy new shelves, and design new label system to change the men's room.
Changing the space is easy to finish, but changing the process needs more effort of eduaction. We made a guidance video for new volunteers on EMMAUS HOUSE youtube channels.
Beside the current solutions, we offered a future service map for EMMUAS HOUSE if they have WIFI and a digitalized form on the mobiles.
After the final presentation of project, I went back to the EMMAUS HOUSE to continue bringing design into reality because the end of project is not the end of innovation. The Non-profit organization needs continues help in the long term to make changes.
