Bringing community voices into the co-design of digital skills for employability, and shaping a more strategic way of working with funders and centres, so digitally excluded people get better support into work.
Good Things Foundation had three separately funded digital skills for employability projects running in parallel, each with its own partners, audiences, and requirements. The organisation needed to bring these together into a single coherent programme and produce a delivery playbook that community organisations across the Online Centres Network could use to support digitally excluded adults into employment.
Each of the three funding streams served distinct communities: BAME communities in Bradford, people navigating mid-life career transitions, and adults on low incomes receiving devices and connectivity for the first time. The audiences, barriers, and local contexts were different, but the underlying question was the same: how do you help people who are digitally excluded build the skills they need to find work?
The playbook needed to be flexible enough for hyper-local community centres to see their users in it, strategic enough to satisfy funders, and practical enough that a small organisation with limited resources could pick it up and run training from it. It also couldn't be prescriptive, community partners needed creative scope to adapt the model to their own contexts.
I led the service design and research across all three workstreams, working with Honey Badger, a user researcher, a service design intern from Good Things Foundation, and their project management team.
“The playbook couldn't be a set of instructions. Community organisations needed to see their users in it, understand the principles behind it, and have the creative scope to adapt it to their own context.”
The work produced a single delivery playbook that unified the three funding streams into a coherent service model for digital skills and employability.
