The Global Health practice focuses on ensuring women of all ages can make informed choices about their family’s health and wellbeing. The complications of pregnancy are a leading cause of death for adolescent girls across the developing world. For many more, having a child too soon means dropping out of school and continuing an intergenerational cycle of poverty. 

The Equity practice supports marginalized communities across the U.S. to break cycles of poverty and inequality. 

The Prosperity practice works to create tools and services that strengthen livelihoods and help people build financial resilience. 

The Transformation practice helps organizations evolve to meet emerging development and humanitarian challenges.

In addition, Ideo.org designs and produces guides and tutorials so that partners and aspiring changemakers can utilize their approach. 

In just ten years, their interventions have reached over 68 million people around the world. They have reached 1.1 million people through services including the first customer service platform for refugees, 53 million through informational campaigns such as those that raise awareness of birth justice, 9 million through digital and physical products such as a mobile money app for Bangladeshis, and 1 million through their design kit platform, which teaches tools designed to empower human-centered problem solvers. 

We were fortunate enough to catch up with Daniel Feldman and Adam Reineck of Ideo.org on our podcast Social Design Insights. Have a listen at the link above.

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The resulting “We Care Solar Suitcase” powers overhead LED lighting, charges cell phones, and includes LED headlamps that come with rechargeable batteries. Since the first developments, the suitcases have now been deployed in more than twenty countries.

In 2013, We Care Solar worked with White Ribbon Alliance and AMREF Health Africa to launch Saving Lives at Birth. The initiative provided Solar Suitcases equipped with fetal Dopplers, headlamps, phone chargers, and laptop computers; education for health workers; an electronic Health Management Information System; and community sensitization training to increase awareness and demand for maternal-newborn services to 100 primary health facilities in Southwest Uganda for 3 years.

Studies of the initiative found that 24-hour lighting was critical, especially during delivery and post-partum. With improved lighting from Solar Suitcases, health workers were able to stay on duty longer and mothers no longer had to pay for kerosene, candles, or torches. In addition, phone charging allowed community health workers to easily make emergency referrals. 

Overall, Solar Suitcase and laptops increased staff motivation and confidence, resulting in less absenteeism. There was a 66 percent increase in skilled deliveries over the period, including a rise in nighttime deliveries by 80 percent. As a result of the combined interventions, health facility-based perinatal deaths decreased by 73.5 percent, and the rate of facility-based maternal deaths dropped by 53 percent.

Dr. Aronson and Dr. Sachel also developed an educational program, We Share Solar, which encourages youth to link science and technology with humanitarian service. The program combines solar energy and engineering education with real-world applicability. Teachers cultivate interests in STEM and inspire students to meet immediate needs in the developing world.

We were fortunate enough to speak with Dr. Aronson on our podcast Social Design Insights. Have a listen at the link above.

The post 101 | Light is Life appeared first on Curry Stone Foundation.

The project quickly grew into a global network of communication hubs that welcomed collaborating artists, entrepreneurs, and people from all walks of life. The portals are continuously used to host live events, engage in conversation, conduct hackathons, and otherwise make connections that otherwise couldn’t be made.

Shared Studios now has two main products: immersive portals that connect people as if in the same room, and global programming that fosters conversations between people with different lived experiences to unlock transformative insights.

Shared Studios has expanded to build a global network of these immersive Portals across 25+ countries in educational institutions, museums, parks, and corporations connecting 500,000+ people across distances and differences. People have written over 7,000+ pages of testimonials about their work, and they have been covered by most of the world’s leading press.

Before co-founding Shared Studios, Michelle was a multi-media journalist based in the Middle East. She has written for Reuters, CNN, The Huffington Post, and Energy Intelligence Group. She worked as a community organizer for the 2008 Obama Campaign and at the National Iranian American Council where she empowered citizens to become active members of their civil society. Michelle graduated from the University of Virginia and received her master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

We had a chance to speak with Michelle on Social Design Insights about this remarkable practice. Have a listen.

The post 100 | Designing Portals to Connect the World appeared first on Curry Stone Foundation.

The $80 US ReMotion Knee was created to address the high cost of fitting and maintaining prosthetic limbs. Not only are prosthetics themselves expensive, they need frequent adjustment and can rust and swell, exacerbating the need for ongoing maintenance. The ReMotion Knee was conceived to be as simple and flexible as a natural knee, with a minimum of parts and using a single hinge so that it swings naturally.

Of course, affordability is more than design. Products also need to be distributed efficiently to keep markups and other incremental costs to a minimum. D-Rev addresses this via innovative partnerships with distributors to ensure its products are broadly available at sustainable market terms. For example, D-Rev’s distribution agreements are structured so that that for-profit distributors receive higher margins when they sell devices to hospitals with the greatest social need. The distributors are free to sell to high-end hospitals too, in which case D-Rev receives a larger percentage.

More recently, D-Rev has embarked on a strategic redesign they’re calling D-Rev 2.0. After ten years, they’re opening channels of partnership so that other organizations can leverage D-Rev’s expertise in strategy, marketing and ecosystem building.

They’ve also turned their expertise to additional public health questions, including respiratory distress in infants and newborn nutrition. Future endeavors look to produce both strategies and devices that engage these critical issues.

We had a chance to catch up with D-Rev CEO Krista Donaldson about all the new directions at D-Rev, as well as the future of technology in the social design movement. Have a listen.

The post 99 | Catching Up with D-Rev 2.0 appeared first on Curry Stone Foundation.

Ken is also well known for his writing and blogging on Africa. His work has been published online by CNN, the BBC, and The Guardian, among others. He has written for the print edition of Wired Magazine, and has had guest chapters published in a number of collaborative books. 

In late 2013 he published his first book, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator,” an edited volume on social innovation with a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The follow-up, “Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation: International Case Studies and Practice”, which came with forewords by musician and humanitarian Peter Gabriel and the Founder of Ashoka, Bill Draytonas, was published by Kogan Page in March 2016. 

More recently, Ken was presented the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science by the Association for Computing Machinery in the USA, and in 2018 appointed Visiting Fellow at the prestigious Judge Business School in Cambridge. In April 2018 Ken closed down kiwanja.net to take on a full-time role as Head of Social Purpose at Yoti, a London-based startup developing innovative digital identity solutions.

We were lucky to have Ken Banks on our Social Insights Podcast. Have a listen at the link above.

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