Student Health Leaders
Northwestern x CFAAR
Challenge: CFAAR (Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research) is interested in expanding its engagement and support of high school students within existing initiatives, such as Student Health Leaders (SHL).
Solution: The team created a playbook for the CFAAR team to enhance their student events, including the Student Health Leaders program. It offers strategies for collaborative programming, tailoring activities to student interests, and improving outreach and engagement. The playbook emphasizes continuous collaboration and community building
Background
The Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research (CFAAR) at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine is based at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. For several years, CFAAR has offered three types of programs in collaboration with Chicago-area schools for high school students interested in medical research and public health.
In winter 2022, several students, including myself, from the Engineering Design Innovation program volunteered with the Student Health Leaders (SHL) program, helping students develop projects using design thinking methods to address health issues in their communities. This experience introduced us to CFAAR's program operations and goals.
The following quarter, we collaborated with CFAAR again to redesign SHL programming. CFAAR had observed increased student interest and noticed project topics expanding beyond their expertise, such as gun violence and mental health. Additionally, there was a significant drop in attendance after the first two sessions. To address these issues, CFAAR aimed to better meet student needs and sustain engagement throughout and after the program.
Course: Service Design Sprints
Project Length: March - June 2023
Contributions: Secondary research, stakeholder interviews and creating research stimuli and plans, Graphics for final presentation materials and playbook
Team Members: Amanda Acquaire, Corinne Brady, Ada Michaels Shapiro, Ritika Ramesh
EDI students volunteering at first day of SHL 2023
Research
The team collaborated closely with CFAAR members to understand their operations and what they saw the future of CFAAR programs to look like. We reviewed application materials, program content, and information on participating schools. Our goal was to learn about CFAAR’s programs and what attracted students to them. We also interviewed past participants and analyzed surveys from SHL seminar attendees. This information helped us map the student experience in attending CFAARs programs, identify what students felt was missing from their experience and what prevented CFAAR from being able to meet their goals.
Presentation materials summarizing findings from the research phase
The Playbook
The playbook was created to provide CFAAR with a set of tools and resources to help co-design, implement, and maintain their student programming. All information presented is based on the information gathered in interviews and secondary research. Ongoing iteration is key to ensure the concepts presented in this playbook continue to reflect both students’ needs and CFAAR’s goals in the future. To help with this process the team also provided the discussion guides used for interviewing students as well as any other relevant research materials. We also stressed the importance of input from all stakeholders - most especially students - to be incorporated into any designs prototyped and as potential measures for success.
Below is the majority of the playbook that was delivered.
What I learned:
Scoping the Project
This project was part of a course called “Design Sprints” where students form a group to take on a project for a quarter. This course is unique in that it is team-driven. Meaning that although we had a mentor, it was up to our team to determine how we would use our time throughout the quarter. We determined our own deliverables and deadlines and ultimately what direction our project was heading in. This course was monumental in helping me understand how best to budget the time our team had over the course of 10 weeks to deliver an actionable playbook to pass off to the CFAAR team.
Understanding Complex systems
Through the research we conducted, I also learned more about how to understand complex systems like CFAAR and its programming. We talked to a lot of individuals to understand their roles and piece it together to get a better view of the organization as a whole. This helped us in understanding the feasibility of CFAAR to carry out our suggestions for their programming.
Accounting for the voices in the room
This was also a challenging project because there were so many different factors to take into consideration when it came to the students and understanding what their needs were. Unfortunately we were unable to talk to as many students as we would have wanted to for this project. However from the interviews we did have and additional resources from CFAAR, it became very apparent that every student's situation was unique. We took all these different factors into consideration to best deliver an equally enjoyable experience for all with strong recommendations for the need for constant involvement and check-in from the voices that matter most, the students.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank our mentor, Erica Isaacs for guiding us, providing feedback and cheering us on throughout the quarter.
I would also like to thank the CFAAR team and students for taking the time to meet with us, send us resources, and for all the work you do to make CFAARs programming possible.
Lastly, I would like to thank my teammates (listed at the top) for bringing all of your talents into this project and for making it such a memorable and enjoyable experience for me.
Team Safari on Figma