Where to start

Six settings with concrete multiplier ideas, for when you cannot think of a problem.

By the end of this lesson

Find a starting point in a setting you already have access to
Adapt a general idea to a specific local situation
Choose based on access rather than on interest alone

Watch

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The lesson

The most common reason people stall is not disagreement with any of this. It is not being able to think of a problem, which is a strange kind of blindness given that everyone is surrounded by them.

The six cards in this lesson are settings, each with a few concrete things that have worked. They are not a menu to pick from so much as a way of getting your attention pointed somewhere specific, after which you will usually see the real problem yourself — and it will be a version of the one on the card with local details that change everything.

Choose on access rather than interest. The setting where you already know someone, already attend, or already have standing is the one where this will actually happen. Enthusiasm for a setting you have no route into produces a plan and no work.

One caution carried over from earlier: these cards describe solutions, and the framework starts with people. Use a card to decide where to go and who to talk to. Do not use it to decide what to build before you have spoken to anybody.

Straight from the framework

Education

Families navigating a school system that assumes they already understand it.

Tutoring resources a teaching assistant can run without preparation
Plain-language guides to the processes parents are expected to know
A searchable list of local scholarships and what each actually requires

Local government

Residents affected by decisions taken in documents they will never read.

Plain-language summaries of public meetings, published the same week
Budgets turned into something a resident can see the shape of
Guides to when and how to speak on a local decision, with the dates

Nonprofits

Small organisations doing the work with no capacity to chase funding.

Help drafting funding applications against what the funder asked for
Analysis of where local need is concentrated, from data already published
A map of who else is doing this, so effort stops being duplicated

Older adults

People locked out of services that moved online without them.

Scam-awareness material written for the approaches actually in use locally
Short guides to the tools families are trying to stay in touch with
Someone alongside them through a government website that assumes fluency

Small business

Owners competing with firms that have departments for this.

Marketing help for people with no marketing budget or time
Short productivity training staff can complete between shifts
Customer-service templates that keep the shop's own voice

Families

Parents in a crisis, navigating several systems at once and none of them well.

Crisis-navigation guides that say what to do first, and then next
Directories of local support that are actually current
Transport and resource maps for people without a car

Do this in the app

Put the lesson down somewhere real

Pick the setting you have the clearest access to and name one person in it you could speak to this week.
Done when — You have a setting and a name.
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Go further

Check yourself