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Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation
the workforce agency for the city of Detroit.
Challenge: To reimagine the City of Detroit’s career centers.
Solution: Over a year, the team works with city employees and their workforce providers to use Human Centered Design and insights from Behavioral Science to help Detroit grow from 3 to 9 Career Centers by focusing on the customer. We have been helping to redesign the physical space of centers, the intake, orientation, and referral processes. Importantly, we are working together to change the culture to one of problem solving, customer orientation, experimentation, and the mindset of innovators.
Services Provided: Human Centered Design, Facilitation
CORO Northern California
CORO provides leadership training to equip people with the ability to collaborate and accelerate positive change regardless of where they are.
Challenge: To tailor CORO’s already robust leadership training to the workforce development sector.
Solution: We are designing a leadership program for a group of workforce development leaders that includes a combination of methods and skills included in Coro’s leadership and Fellows programs, along with content relevant to to the workforce system.
Services Provided: Human Centered Design, Teaching, Expertise in workforce development
US Department of Labor, ETA
The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) administers federal government job training and worker dislocation programs, federal grants to states for public employment service programs, and unemployment insurance benefits.
Challenge: To catalyze Customer-Centered Design in the public workforce system
Solution: At the Department of Labor, Virginia served as ETA’s Regional Administrator covering 8 states and 4 territories in the West Coast. She also worked for the Secretary of Labor's office on issues of employee engagement and innovation. She spearheaded the Customer-Centered Design Initiative, which trained over 2,000 workforce development professionals in human centered design. Virginia collaborated with IDEO, a global design company that uses design thinking methods, to help the unemployed have better customer experiences and better outcomes.
Services Provided: Human Centered Design, Facilitation, Public Speaking
Children’s Council of San Francisco
The Children’s Council of San Francisco provides subsidized child care for low income families, and provides training and support to child care providers.
Challenge: To recruit more people to become licensed providers in the city and to increase participation in the Quality Improvement Network, ensuring higher quality care for children in licensed home care.
Solution: We developed a strategy to more deeply understand the needs and motivations of child care providers along a spectrum of licensing levels, and used insights from behavioral science and human centered design to review and redesign marketing and program information materials. We also developed recommendations for prototyping and testing improvements to existing programs, and created new program models.
Services Provided: Human Centered Design, Facilitation
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I got to know Virginia inside a large Cabinet agency — where in addition to her day job leading a regional office, she became the go-to facilitator for our most important leadership retreats. She coached our agency’s senior leaders on how to design and execute the meetings that mattered most, as well as provided concrete tools and practical tips for making the most of the time you have together, whether in person or by video conference.
/ Rajesh - former Deputy Executive Director, National Employment Law Project /
Additional Clients
State of Indiana Governor’s Workforce Cabinet
College of Social Work, University of South Carolina
SPUR
WestEd
National Governors Association
State of Pennsylvania State Workforce Board
Partnership for Public Service
Roadtrip Nation
California Competes
James Irvine Foundation
Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development
East Bay Economic Development Alliance
Featured Articles and Videos
On Leading Change: Three Simple Lessons on Innovation from Government
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A once-jobless US civil servant is using design thinking to tackle unemployment
Transforming Workforce Development Boards into Innovation Engines