social services
Supporting the 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.
Key Details
- Multi-disciplinary engagement over 5 years to support the refinement of services, capabilities, and networks
- Engaged a decentralized network of partners to drive service maturity and consistency
- Our client unlocked $50M+ in government funding to solidify and scale this new service across the ecosystem
Our Approach
1
Our work with this client has plugged in at all scales of the service delivery ecosystem over the past five years. At the most fundamental level, the basics of service journeys and models need to be credible among both funders and service users; with this in mind, we worked with local delivery partners to develop service blueprints of emerging models, with the goal of making it easier to standardize best practices and scale out to new partners.
2
Looking beyond the discrete service models of today, we worked with our client and their partners to envision the future of the ecosystem as a whole, facilitating adaptive and systems-wise conversations that have helped shape the direction for the evolving network.
3
One of the pathways to enabling that network to reach new clients and sustain itself has focused on embedding this new service alongside existing services, like employment supports. Our work co-designing and mapping out inter-agency service journeys has helped to shift the ecosystem from one-off pilots to services that are natural complements to what the system is already doing.
4
As the ecosystem changes, our client’s role has needed to evolve, too. Working with the leadership team, we defined a set of foundational service-delivery 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, facilitating sessions with the working level, leadership, and the board to drive alignment.
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
$50M
in government funding unlocked, enabling the team to scale from a handful of diehard pilot sites to a true national service with more than 90 delivery partners.