Funding and Enabling Community-Led Innovation

Titiro Whakamuri, Kōkiri Whakamua

Look back and reflect before you move forwards

- Māori whakatauki (proverb)

The Brief

In mid 2019, Sport NZ approached Business Lab with an innovative idea. But before we get to that, let’s go back a few steps in this story.

Despite what you might imagine from the name, Sport NZ’s purpose is broader than organised sport. As the kaitiaki (guardian) of the play, active recreation and sport system in Aotearoa New Zealand, it aims to contribute to the wellbeing of everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Following the release of the Government’s Strategy for Women and Girls in Sport and Active Recreation, Sport NZ set out to commit to a set of actions that would bring the strategy to life. 

When faced with a new strategy, many funders and commissioners will create new targeted funds. You know the drill. An organisation applies, gets the funding, does their work and then reports back to the funder.

But Sport NZ wanted to do more than this.

This led to the Innovations for Young Women Design Challenge - one of over 20 commitments from Sport NZ.

Introducing the Innovations for Young Women Design Challenge

The innovative idea was to combine funding with start-up guidance and mentoring.

This was a new approach to funding for Sport NZ. The idea was to facilitate a design challenge weekend where eight teams would test, develop and progress some new ideas. Twelve months of follow-up support would  help the teams to test and deliver their ideas in their communities.

To contribute to the Women and Girls Strategy, the Design Challenge had three key goals:

• Develop and test innovative new ideas: Sport NZ wanted to enable eight teams to codesign new ideas that would help young women to get and stay active.

• Strengthen the sector’s codesign capability: Sport NZ wanted to build the capability of people to codesign initiatives with young people in their community. They wanted the participants’ experience to have an impact on their communities and organisations after the Design Challenge was over.

• Learn about Sport NZ’s role in the system: Last but not least, Sport NZ wanted the Challenge to be a learning experience that could inform Sport NZ decisions about funding and investing in community-led innovation.

Sport NZ needed somebody to guide the participants through this learning journey, and that’s where Business Lab stepped in.

Our Approach

In our proposal to Sport NZ, we attempted to outline how our approach would suit this initiative.

We based our approach on three principles - chosen based on our experience with similar innovation programmes with communities.

Whakawhanaungatanga - people first, projects second

Many design challenges suffer a fatal flaw: they focus on projects instead of people. The organisers forget that many participants are new to design thinking or have never met the other people in the room. 

We had learned from our previous work with LifehackHQ about the importance of relationships. As a result, we always dedicate more time than most to relationship-building at the start of a design challenge and we see this flow into improved project outcomes.

Ako - shared learning

Many design challenges create an atmosphere of competition, but we find this unhelpful. 

Instead, we apply the principle of ako, which encourages people to bring their existing skills and strengths. Ako is about shared learning, about recognising the inherent strengths in everybody.

We focussed on enabling participants to bring their previous experiences to the table and to share those with others. In our experience, this diversity of thought and experience is what makes a Design Challenge successful.

Manaakitanga - welcoming spaces

Many design challenges throw people straight into the mahi (work) with only a token ice-breaker. And then they wonder why people are nervous and afraid to make mistakes. 

In the first hui (gathering), this meant welcoming participants with a pōwhiri (greeting process) from a member of the tangata whenua iwi (the original inhabitants of the land). 

Then, based on the principle of manaakitanga - making people feel welcome and safe - we spent time on welcoming people and creating psychological safety in the group. Once those basic safety and comfort needs are met, we found the participants were well placed to develop and test their ideas.

What this looked like

Lessons Learned

COVID-19 threw a spanner in the works, right in the middle of the 12 month innovation programme.

With schools closing, the participants had to create alternative ways to encourage young women to be active. Or some decided to ‘push pause’ for several months.

Despite the setback, all the teams came back strongly and continued to innovate with young women.

In our programme evaluation, we found four key insights for participants:

We thought we were codesigning but we weren’t

“We thought we were serving girls really well, thought we were being collaborative but we weren’t. Learning how to properly collaborate with girls and learn about their pain points and pleasure points - that was a big take-home for me.”

The concept of prototyping was a big shift

“The whole prototyping thing was new. But we did learn from that. We didn’t want to do a prototype, we just wanted to make the whole thing happen. But we get it now. We used to just go straight in, big and bold. It’s made us think a lot more around the planning and what to do.” 

The importance of looking after your own wellbeing

“Everything was coming at us in the first hui, it was pushing me out of my comfort zone. But you know, it was helpful for me to be in that learning pit as well. If we’re going to do that for students, it’s good for us to experience it too.”

The value of partnering with unusual suspects

At the second hui (gathering), we asked teams to share their successes and challenges in the first four months of the programme. One clear theme emerged - partnering with organisations was invaluable in finding young women to codesign with.

Recommendations

We also made a set of recommendations to Sport NZ about how a programme like this might be further strengthened.

Bicultural programme design

We recommended to Sport NZ that it codesign a bicultural Design Challenge, with the aim of enabling culturally appropriate codesign models and processes that could be shared across the sector.

Codesign the selection criteria

We recommended that Sport NZ redesign the selection criteria with this year’s participants to ensure teams enter the Design Challenge with a curiosity to learn and test new ideas. 

We noticed that some teams arrived with a clear idea of their solution and some had even begun implementing their project. These teams found it harder to re-examine their context and adapt their project based on participant needs.

Stronger compulsory online component

We recommended a stronger compulsory online component to improve connectedness and enable greater support during any future lockdowns. 

To our surprise, we learned in the programme evaluation that many teams wanted a compulsory online component to keep them accountable. If the Design Challenge had a stronger online component from the start, this would make it easier to support teams if there are future interruptions due to lockdowns. 

Guaranteed minimum funding and funding timelines

We recommended that Sport NZ award a guaranteed stipend for the teams’ participation in the programme, rather than requiring teams to submit for funding partway through the Design Challenge. 

Our hope is that a guaranteed minimum funding stipend would recognise the participants’ contribution to the programme’s learning outputs, and would mean fewer teams will have to volunteer their time to develop and test their ideas. An agreed funding timeline would provide teams with greater certainty about when they can prototype their ideas.

Dedicated investment in evaluation

Finally, we recommended a specialist evaluator to evaluate the programme’s impact. A specialist evaluator would help with spreading the programme’s learning outcomes across the sector.