Welcome to episode 32 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I chat with Marium Vahed about how service design and innovation thinking can be brought into a nonprofit service setting. When I saw that Marium had started an MSc in Digital Management, I wanted to learn more about how she had been able to incorporate design thinking into her work. I think it’s an approach that more of us in the sector could benefit learning more about, and she agreed to chat. I’ve been open about how I consider design thinking more or less a rebrand of popular education and community engagement techniques our sector used to focus a lot on. The language has changed, but the idea of co-creation, or creating with our communities, is something in our sector’s core values. I think there is much to learn from what has become a formalized and professionalized practice in the design thinking world, but also a lot we contribute and bring to the conversation. Here are some of the initial questions we used to guide our conversation: * How would you define design thinking?* How can it be used in a community service setting?* How have you been able to introduce it into your work?* How have your colleagues and peers reacted?* What’s been useful, what hasn’t worked as well?* When we we look at design thinking and community engagement approaches typical in the nonprofit sector, do you see a lot of overlap in the ideas, models, and approaches?* If someone in a nonprofit was interested in learning more about incorporating design thinking into their work, what would you suggest they do to get started? Marium’s bio Marium Vahed believes in a green movement that prioritizes collaboration across diverse communities and sectors to build a robust, equitable and sustainable future. In 2019, Marium co-founded Green Ummah, a non-profit that raises awareness amongst Canadian Muslims of the Islamic environmental teachings and empowers them to become leaders in the green movement. For her work, she was awarded Top 25 Environmentalists Under 25. Marium graduated from the University of Toronto with an HBA in Anthropology and Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She brings this passion to North York Community House where she works on the Journeys to Active Citizenship team to co-design civic engagement curriculum for immigrants and refugees. Marium is currently a candidate for a Master of Science in Digital Management at Ivey Business School where she is the VP Partnerships at the Ivey MSc Entrepreneurship Club. She envisions bringing best practices of innovation and entrepreneurship to her community. Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio. Marco Campana 0:00Welcome to Episode 32 of the technology and human services podcast. In this episode, I chat with Marium Vahed about how service design and innovation th...