The New Options Initiative (NOI) intends to create a viable system that connects out-of-school youth with meaningful employment. As part of this initiative I spent the summer of 2008 working with ID faculty, a team of ID students (and recent grads), Matter (a strategy firm in Atlanta) and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to figure out how this system could work. We used ethnographic research methods to get to know a variety of stakeholders, including out-of-school youth, local business leaders and experts from community based organizations (CBO). This research led to a variety of hypotheses, insights and frameworks and ultimately to a prototype system that we brought into the field and tested. At the end of the summer Jim Heys and I stayed on the project for an additional six weeks. We split our time between wrapping up the previous ten weeks of work, analyzing the strategies that make certain CBOs successful and creating a branding platform for NOI (check out exposuresacademy.com). The incredibly talented people I worked with, the amount that I learned (thanks Jim Heys, Chris Conley, Vijay Kumar and Jeff Harris) and the importance of getting this solution right all combined to make this project a highlight of my professional career.
