Story-Engine
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Goal:
To co-develop a new culture of story-telling with the community partner
Project Advisors:
Sharon Green
Laura Weiss
Tools:
Adobe CS
Google Apps
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Duration:
8 weeks
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Community Partner:
BAWSI (Bay Area Women's Sports Initiative)
Methodologies:
Appreciative Inquiry
Co-design
Developing a communication culture
Team:
Frances Castillo, Teesta Das, Yuchen Tong,
Chorock Park, Lara Kabkab
Click here, to learn more about how we self-managed and organised ourselves as a team
Challenge Overview
BAWSI, the Bay Area Women’s Sports Initiative is a non-profit organization that helps underprivileged girls gain confidence, leadership skills and a sense of belonging through exercise and play. BAWSI is based in Northern California, and its school programs are mainly in the South Bay Area.
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While BAWSI has already helped 18,000 children in the last 10 years, the demand for BAWSI’s work extends to the greater Bay Area. In order to keep serving vulnerable children and expand its efforts into the future, BAWSI needs to scale its financial support and stand out from the crowd. Doing this effectively requires BAWSI to create a personal connection with donors through storytelling. We started working with BAWSI this fall to conduct design research, develop insights, and help co-create solutions to help BAWSI tell its story in a more systematic and sustainable way.
Appreciative Inquiry
BAWSI (pronounced “bossy”) provides powerful interventions for the most vulnerable children in communities in the form of ACCESS©. It is a framework that they used to measure impact. Their programs: BAWSI Girls and BAWSI Rollers focus on these proven factors that help increase resilience in children living with adversity.
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Why low-income schools?
BAWSI’s tagline “Active lives, Empowered Futures” is based on research that says ‘One in three kids in the United States is overweight or obese.’ Because children spend so much time at school, schools have a unique opportunity to help children become more healthy and active.
Further, both childhood obesity and poor academic performance tend to be clustered in schools with a high percentage of lower-income, minority students, creating a student health issue that is especially problematic in those communities.”

Given this background, BAWSI partners with elementary schools of lower-income minority students, where it is trying to demonstrate the academic and health benefits by providing physical education to girls from 3rd to 5th grade.
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Positive Core & Communication Culture
As the BAWSI founders were one of the legendary Female American Soccer players, they wanted to harness the power of female athletes to impact society and give them an opportunity to connect through authentic, intentional service. Although none of us in the team were American, we were really fascinated and moved by their intentions. The sports leaders began working on the concept for BAWSI as a Sports initiative of the Women Athlete leaders for young girls, and now extending even to children with disabilities, whom they call BAWSI Rollers.
Our research focus and attitude to enter the system of BAWSI was to be able to engage with the key stakeholders and learn from them with a growth mindset. During our first meeting with the current CEO, Jen Fraisl, amongst the several other current organizational needs, she mentioned that the most pressing problem for them lies in communicating better with their Donors. Any support from us, would in turn greatly support BAWSI to grow in the next few years.
Understanding the communication culture of BAWSI, we wanted to co-develop a communication channel that helps to build a shared vision across their stakeholder system.
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While learning about their Positive Core, which is the best of the values they already possess. Some of them namely:
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Leadership - taking the lead as a non-profit sports initiative as women
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Mindfulness - although they play outdoors, the athlete leaders never wear any shades as they feel it is a barrier for eye contact with the girls
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Integrity - very honest about their work in the schools
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Collaboration - bridging gaps by working with community schools, athlete clubs, donors
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Enthusiasm - the highest at the school sites
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Playfulness - the highest at the school sites
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Gratitude for every opportunity - one of the athlete leader when interviewed spoke about how her experience here has shifted her perspective to be grateful that she could contribute by playing with the girls.
"Connected Coaching"
Through our site visits and interviews with athlete leaders and BAWSI Staff, we learned that the essence of their Positive Core lies in telling impactful stories of the girls who have grown through the program and gained meaningful life-skills during their time at BAWSI.
Through ‘Connected Coaching’, BAWSI supports not only the girls whom they mentor but also the athlete leaders who awaken to a different side of their leadership capacity as they lead and mentor these young girls.
Synthesizing
After our first round of research, synthesis and ideation, we presented five sacrificial concepts with an investment/impact map to the stakeholders and facilitated a co-design session with BAWSI’s CEO Jen, BAWSI’s Development Director Sherri, and BAWSI’s Board Member Tracy. We got to know their thoughts on the effectiveness and opinions on implementation.
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Our concepts were across the scale of simplicity in execution and technology conventions. The digital solutions were perceived as "a nice to have", and brought out concerns of trust over the quality of data being exposed at scale. Immense fear towards the bad actors in the system. Appreciative of their responsibility and concerns, we developed the story engine idea selected by them as an internal communication channel for the ecosystem towards the next few years.
Proposal for implementation
Our project report included details of implementing the solution selected by them. However, to address the deeper challenges of the ecosystem, a round of evaluative research is necessary. The Next steps being-
User-testing the story engine with Athlete Leaders
User-testing the infographics with Donors
Making the infographics that can be edited by BAWSI staff (non-designers)
Project Team Report submitted to BAWSI
Learnings related to Social Lab
While my social lab team and I explored aspects of mental health in teens and young adults, learnings from this project were helpful.
1. I learned about creating empowerment through sports and play. It has the ability to inspire and spark confidence where there exists none or being violated.
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2. The ability to develop trust through "connected coaching" which the athlete leaders were trained in. It is a natural instinct and brings out the positive aspects of being a human. This has the potential to become a shared language and also a shared vision.
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3. Where does responsibility lie when it comes to leveraging digital technologies while working with vulnerable groups?
We found how with the use of technology to augment the first-person user's experience, created trust amongst the Donors at one point. The BAWSI donor network included a partnership with the Pedometer company, which supported with free pedometers to all the enrolled girls. The active tracking of footsteps has become a source of genuinely joyful activity for the girls today, unlike what we see with users of Nike Fuelband or Fitbit: a highly commercialized space for physical fitness. A part of the opportunity lies in aiming to bridge this social divide.
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