Listen

San Rafael’s groundbreaking Together San Rafael (TSR) initiative was born out of the desire to create the capacity for collaborative problem-solving across departments. In order to address this need, the City hired CivicMakers in 2017 to run a “Learning Lab” designed to teach Human-Centered Design to all employees (case study here).

In 2024 the City invited CivicMakers to return to redesign the “Learning Lab” program collaboratively with City staff to meet the current needs of the City in the wake of the pandemic, extensive staff turnover, and a reinvigoration of the Together San Rafael initiative. We worked closely with City staff to revisit learnings from the original program and address current needs.

Learn

Through our discovery and co-design phase it was clear that the City still wanted a learn-by-doing innovation program designed to help solve challenges facing the City while teaching the principles of human centered design (HCD). We also learned that many people would have a hard time committing to the program if it required a lot of ‘homework’ and that people would be more likely to commit if they could work on projects that were already underway.

In response to these needs, we redesigned the original program as a 6-month learning journey with half-day monthly sessions that included time for both learning and team work. The curriculum taught project management, human-centered design, qualitative data analysis, and presentation skills to a cross-departmental cohort.

Program assessments rated the program highly, and self-assessments showed that participants felt they would be more likely to collaborate with colleagues, to listen and encourage creative ideas, and to apply human-centered design in their daily work after completing the program.

A few months after the program’s Showcase presentations, which took place at the historic Rafael Theater and were open to all City employees, our team came back to lead a celebration and debrief.

Here’s what we learned:

• Impact on current work – Together Academy helped participants forge new relationships with staff from other departments, which has made working collaboratively across departments easier.
• Best parts of the experience – Participants appreciated getting to work collaboratively and cross-departmentally, instead of feeling like an issue is on a single individual to solve, while spending time doing a deep dive on a specific design challenge.
• What changes they’d recommend – This first Together Academy cohort emphasized a desire to spend more time in the prototyping phase so that they could test some of their proposed solutions with wider audiences.

Make

Close to 20 City employees participated in the 2024 reboot of the Learning Lab program, named the “Together Academy” since it is housed within the City’s innovative “Together San Rafael” initiative. The cohort was divided into three project teams, each of which tackled a unique challenge. To select challenges, the project team polled program participants, with input from leadership. The three challenges that were selected fit the criteria of being current city priorities for which there was at least some work already underway at the City. These included:

1. Together San Rafael and the culture of the City
2. Onboarding new City employees
3. Unpermitted mobile food vending within City limits

Each design team did desk research and conducted stakeholder interviews, analyzed and synthesized their data, redefined their challenges from the perspective of key stakeholders, brainstormed solutions, and prototyped a solution which they presented to their colleagues at Showcase. The solutions developed through the program are currently in various stages of implementation, many of which tie directly to City Council’s goal and objectives, and the City’s strategic plan.

CivicMakers concluded the engagement by transferring all training resources to the City and producing a report sharing learnings from the program, which included feedback from participants and recommended adaptations for future iterations. The City intends to continue conducting the Together Academy annually with the long-term goal of fostering an environment where innovation thrives and collaboration becomes second nature.