QUEENS PILOT
In February 2016, we started our second pilot; this time in Queens, New York. We collaborated with Wishwas for the Spring 2016 semester to explore whether and how Wishwas could refine its program using the Bindi approach. For our team, this was an opportunity to see how the Bindi program could be adapted and implemented in a different community and context, and to understand how to refine the Bindi guide so that it can help different organizations.
With this pilot like with the Nepal pilot), we followed the human-centered design process. We started with a research phase to understand better Wishwas’ offering as well as the needs and motivations of the women participating to the sewing program.
What we did:
• Research:
• Observations and in-situ interviews during sewing classes and a research workshops with the women.
• Interviews with the Wishwas team and partners, and secondary research.
• Our aim: develop a deep understanding of the context and women’s needs and expectations; build relationships with the women participating to the program as we considered them to be key actors and crucial to the success of the program.
• What we've learned: One of the main insights from our research was that while Wishwas program offered technical skills, the women also needed some business skills and general self-development opportunities before they could consider starting a small business or cooperative.
• Ideation: We facilitated two co-creation sessions with Wishwas and some of their partners with the goal to imagine what could be the next iteration of the Wishwas program. We used the Bindi values and general 3-levels strategy to inform our brainstorming. The program envisioned would have a sewing training component combined with a capacity building (leadership and business skills development) component.
Ideation session - DFA NYU and Wishwas, March 2016
Ideation session - DFA NYU and Wishwas, March 2016
• Prototype: In the third phase of our project (April - May 2016), we prototyped and tested this idea.
•What we did:
•The pilot was realized with five participants of the Wishwas sewing program. Participants had to apply and were selected to participate to the pilot. We limited the number of participants to be able to give them full attention and experiment.
• The pilot consisted of three “Leadership development and business preparedness” workshops conducted by the DFA NYU team and used a train-the-trainer approach.
“Leadership development and business preparedness” pilot workshops, April 2016
What we learnt:
• Women were interested in participating to the pilot. This shows the motivation of some of the participants but also their needs for self-development and basic business skills.
• During the workshops, the five participants were very engaged. After the first class, they told us how they had been able to put in practice the communication skills they learnt to facilitate a discussion with the whole group on sewing orders they had received. These positive results and the women feedback confirmed the importance of having a complementary capacity building component as part of the Wishwas sewing program.
This pilot offered Wishwas an opportunity to refine their current program and explore further how to make it self-sustaining. Furthermore, it provided Wishwas with a framework to develop future programs.
Pilot’s stakeholder:
Wishwas is an NGO based in New York, founded in 2010. As part of its mission to “bolster economic and social acculturation by focusing on the social integration and financial empowerment of low-income Immigrant women and their families”, Wishwas offers sewing classes to immigrant women in Queens. They hope is for the women participating to their program to start in the future a sewing cooperative and become economically independent. During the time of our pilot, they were working with a group of fifteen Bangladeshi women.