The Democracy Test Kitchen is an effort to integrate and streamline the University of Washington’s effective track record of partnering with community and policy leaders to advance solutions to pressing problems.
By centering community-identified challenges in Washington and beyond, the Test Kitchen offers a participatory platform for human-centered design in which the University delivers a valuable and necessary service to support the public good. Specifically, it employs the UW’s strategic role and resources, including the talents of our students, to support community leaders in the co-design and implementation of interventions, programs and policy and solutions.
As a result, the Test Kitchen accelerates collaborative problem-solving in a unique setting and enables UW to hone its own capacity to support democratic change at-scale and bolster public trust in these turbulent times.
Outcomes and impact
Through the Test Kitchen, UW offers experiences where people can collaborate and build connections, disagree without being disagreeable and see their ideas woven into a larger product, all of which are critical to reminding people how democracy tastes. It is essential civic nourishment to respond to some of the urgent challenges facing our body politic including the coarsening of social and political discourse, antagonistic engagement and the drowning out of voices in many of our communities.
Importantly, the Test Kitchen develops through this process a range of concrete program ideas, policy solutions and implementation strategies across a wide array of topics – reducing childhood poverty and hunger, improving public safety, building climate resilience, bolstering lifelong learning and sustaining economic growth. These actionable solutions help propel more accessible and effective resolution of shared community challenges by leveraging the wide-ranging substantive and process expertise of the UW.
Case studies
Learn more about the Test Kitchen by exploring some of its initial case studies.
Problem: Washington state’s life expectancy ranking is dropping relative to other high-income countries, yet the formal health care delivery system is not effectively intervening in these trends. Community Health Workers, frontline staff who are trusted health messengers in communities underserved by clinical health services, seem to be a potentially potent solution because they can engage individuals who are most at risk of health concerns such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure that leads to reduced quality of life and early death. However, to implement such an intervention requires statewide, systems change work.
Audience: The external audience is key policy field actors at two state agencies and a network of regional community agencies. UW partners at the outset included faculty, staff and students from the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative and Department of Global Health, with an expansion of engagement as the project progressed.
Approach: The Test Kitchen team began this project by conducting a Situational Analysis, honing understanding of the policy environment and the perspective and power of various stakeholders. Key elements of this Situational Analysis includes:
- Scanning the emerging global research literature about the community health worker model and its impact
- Engaging stakeholders in interviews and a policy field analysis
- Hosting an initial design session with policy leaders and field actors
Initial output: Analysis of current implementation conditions for Community Health Workers led to a focus on supporting these frontline staff to improve access to healthy food and nutritious meals as these choices help drive health outcomes. Learning focuses on how to take local solutions and bring them to larger scale, with plans to design a pragmatic field experiment evaluation to assess what results from these interventions.
Initial outcomes: Key policy field actors are bought into a new type of partnership with the UW. Those actors have co-designed an overall project that is ready for investment and subsequent implementation.
Problem: The Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) is charged with implementing Washington’s Paid Family & Medical Leave program. ESD was interested in improving equitable access to the leave benefit for the employee beneficiaries who need to care for their family members or have time to recover from medical procedures. Other states were in the process of implementing their own programs and the opportunity to engage in cross-state dialogue, to see points of synergy for ongoing paid leave implementation improvement and creative problem solving, was clearly beneficial.
Audience: The external audience was the Perigee Fund and policy advocates, researchers, and state implementers from Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington, DC. Internal partners were the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative and faculty members from the Evans School and School of Social Work.
Approach: The UW hosted nearly 50 state advocates, implementers, and researchers from across the country for two days of discussion regarding the impact and implementation of state-level paid leave policies. The UW took a participatory, human-centered design approach to the convening to help spur thinking about new possibilities for implementation as well as real-time problem-solving discussions.
Initial output: An approximately 30-page summary report of the convening was prepared and disseminated to memorialize the convening.
Initial outcomes: New relationships were formed, research was shared, and new ideas were generated to help support more effective implementation of these policies. All states reported taking insights from the meeting into improving their own implementation actions. The work also sparked a two-year project that led to a recommendation for ESD to develop more engagement infrastructure by implementing a proposed Paid Leave Community Partner Initiative.