Focus areas for YWCA Madison (Photo from Adobe Stock, Icons from the Noun Project)
American Family Insurance: Sharetank
American Family Intern Team: Maia Sanders (Workplace Sustainability Intern), Rupesh Prajapati (Customer Data Analytics Intern), Yun Hsiao (UX Design Intern), Vidya Mantrala (Business Design and Strategy Intern)
In Summer 2018, I worked as an Business Design and Strategy Intern at American Family Insurance. As a way to learn about American Family's commitment to corporate responsibility, cross-disciplinary intern teams were partnered with local non-profits to solve a pressing organizational issue for them. Our team was partnered with the YWCA in Madison. We needed to understand their strategic issue and pitch a solution to American Family Insurance’s Community Investments team to potentially fund that solution.
YWCA Partners: Danielle Dieringer (Operations Director), Chris Ognibene (Facilities Manager)
Skills used: Contextual Inquiry, Needs Assessment, Capacity Assessment
The Problem: Facilities Management
Housing Services Offered by YWCA Madison
The YWCA in Madison relies on their talented and dedicated staff and their 101 Mifflin St. location in the center of downtown Madison to provide the homes that at-risk and low-income women and families need when they are in bad situations.
However the location is a 100+ year-old building with a lot of problematic maintenance issues, and there is not enough staff with the right equipment to both deal with the ongoing maintenance and inventory needs of the building as well as day-to-day issues and emergencies that residents are facing.
We conducted a contextual inquiry with several staff members where we shadowed them in their daily work to uncover many of these issues.
Some of the cleaning and maintenance tools were well organized while others were all over the place distributed throughout the building
Issues within the building can be ongoing or urgent in nature.
The Criteria
1. The solution had to cost $10,000 or less
2.The solution had to match American Family's grant criteria for FY 2018.
3. The solution had to help drive towards the mission of the organization.
4. The solution had to be proposed in such a way, that the implementation of it could be sustained financially over time, outside of the one-time grant that would potentially come from the American Family Dreams Foundation.
The Solution
We proposed that American Family Insurance Community Investments group donate $10,000 to the implementation of a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Managment System) at the YWCA. The money would cover some short term solutions such as equipping the maintenance and housekeeping staff with tablets and creating simple Google tools to submit and track maintenance requests as well as organize inventory, while IT Staff and students in the YWeb Academy (a program to teach critical coding and development skills) implement and customize an official CMMS for the organization.
Diagram of CMMS implementation for YWCA Madison.
The Outcome
American Family Community Investments ended up donating $1000 to the YWCA for this project. We believe that money would be best used in purchasing tablets for the staff and creating Google tools for inventory and maintenance.
To see our full project please take a look. I was so honored to be working with such an important organization in the Madison community. For more information on the amazing work they are doing, visit their website!