top of page
Futures | ThinkPlace Global

Combining mass civic participation and futures thinking to facilitate
co-design of the national strategy for volunteering

My Role
 
  • As a Design Strategist I owned the research & development of the workshop design
     
  • Responsible for prototyping the workshop flow & creating
    required artefacts
Skills
  • Service Design 
  • Futures & Visioning
  • Participatory design
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Prototyping
Visit Website
Collaborators
  • General Manager, Futures
  • National Strategy Advisor, Volunteering Australia
The Challenge
​Volunteering Australia received funding from the Government to lead a new National Strategy for Volunteering. The previous NSV was developed through limited consultation and was never implemented. Since then, the volunteering ecosystem faced a policy vacuum. Faced with these challenges, VA approached ThinkPlace with the challenge:
How can we undertake a co-design process to build the new National Strategy for Volunteering – one which allows anyone engaged with volunteering to have a meaningful say?
Snippets from the co-design workshop 
The Solution
The design journey took 12 months. We started with 'Discovery' to understand the ecosystem, its goals and build an evidence-base. 'Visioning' was at the heart of the process. This is where I was mainly involved.
The workshop had 3 main segments

ICEBREAKER - Futures Four Square:
How do you feel about the future? Its getting worse or better X I feel powerful or powerless
Through community workshops across Australia, we invited volunteers and local organizations to shape the vision for volunteering's future. Their ideas were synthesized into a 10-year vision.

Framed by the vision and other insights from Visioning workshops, the Core Design Team built an actionable plan through co-design.
ARTIFACTS FROM THE FUTURE - Provocation about the future is shared with the group

COLLABORATIVE VISIONING - Participants articulate the values and foundations upon which each cluster in built on. Then the current values and systemic foundations are articulated
The Impact
As a 10-year strategy in early implementation, full impact will be observed in time. So far, the most critical impact is how it brought together stakeholders across an expansive ecosystem around a unifying 10-year agenda. The connections forged have never before been observed in a group of this size. The design means implementation is taking place across levels.

Organizations can use the NSV to evaluate and improve their own programs and activities. This has been a recurring piece of acclaim. As one of the first examples of national strategies being designed this way, we attracted great interest domestically and internationally.
ThinkPlace Australia won the 'Good Design Award' for social impact in 2023
for this workshop design 🎉
bottom of page