Supporting the national scale-up of a new kind of public service

Canadians living on low income have few formal supports to help them navigate their way out of precarity, and many of the supports that do exist are either hard to access or outright predatory. A new kind of public service is emerging that improves access to government benefits, helps people manage debt, and coaches them to stability and even prosperity. But this new service won’t move out of the piloting trap on its own, and our client, and national non-profit, has undertaken the mission of helping it scale to sustainability.

How We Helped

• We worked with local delivery partners to develop blueprints of emerging service models, with the goal of making it easier to standardize and scale out to new delivery sites
• We mapped and tested possible models for embedding these services within existing public services, like employment supports
• We defined a set of foundational capabilities that our client would need to evolve in order to play the national backbone role required for scale and sustainability, plus options for organizational models that would bring those capabilities to life
• We facilitated leadership team and board conversations to help build alignment around the mission and structure required for success going forward

Key Insights

• Successful national scale-up with a decentralized, distributed partner structure meant nested layers of frontline service models, partner support service models, and associated business models at all levels. Mapping, co-design, and a prototype-and-iterate spirit were essential over traditional top-down models of decision-making.
• The capabilities our client required for their start-up era were different from those they would need as they helped to scale the service, requiring us to go beyond service experience to help them think about what needed to change under the hood
• Standardization was a double-edged sword, driving service credibility but also bumping up against partners' desires for independence. Blueprinting helped us articulate core service components while leaving room for flexible delivery.

Outcome

After two decades of work, our client unlocked more than $50M in funding from the federal government, enabling them to scale from a handful of diehard pilot sites to a true national service with more than 90 delivery partners.