Last October, we wrote a blog about the Advisory Team of young people with intellectual disabilities that helped us review grants from the fall 2019 grant cycle. In that blog, we focused on the creation of the team, the process of coming together to review grants, and the great feedback that we got. The Advisory Team was really the culmination of a longer Human-Centered Design project in which the entire staff explored how to better engage and amplify beneficiary voice in the work that we do.
We wanted to capture the whole process and what we learned along the way. To this end, we submitted an article to The Foundation Review, a peer-reviewed journal that covers the field of philanthropy. We are happy to report that the article, Human-Centered Design and Foundation Staff: A Case Study in Engaging Grant Beneficiaries, was accepted and appeared in the journal in March 2020.
We hope you will take a look at the article. There is much more detail about the Human-Centered Design methodology, as we experienced it and as it has been taken up by philanthropy more broadly. We also provided an update on the Advisory Team and its contribution to a second grant cycle earlier this year. It is an open access article, just click on the download button and it is yours for free!
Here is a link to the The Foundation Review article:
Human-Centered Design and Foundation Staff: A Case Study in Engaging Grant Beneficiaries by Nicholas G. Randell, M.B.A., and Megan MacDavey, M.S.S.A., Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation
Even better, here is a link to Megan’s introduction to the article:
[You’ll also find a link to the article below the video.]