The Beth-el Center:
Reducing Childhood Trauma in Homeless Shelters
The Beth-el Project
The Beth-el Center:
Reducing Childhood Trauma in Homeless Shelters
Summary:
Members of our Beth-El Center team worked with a local homeless shelter in Milford, CT to help reduce childhood trauma.
Over the course of the project, our team realized that we couldn't just paint the walls and add more toys. Staffers worried that the children might then create overly positive associations with homeless shelters. Instead, we needed to focus on creating a comforting and nurturing environment for children, without "Disney-fying" the experience. After prototyping an idea for a portable bathroom light and a coloring book, we delivered both prototypes the center. The Beth-el center loved the coloring book and continued to use it, as well as pass it on to other shelters in the area.
I was project lead for this project and my responsibilities included finding and managing our partnerships, and leading the team through the design process. I used tools such as How Might We statements, Point of View statements, user profiles, discussion guides and interview tools, as well as brainstorming strategies and decision matrices to ensure we made the biggest impact in our users lives that we could.
For the prototypes I took the lead on creating the plastic leaves for the night light, using the thermoformer to design the shape we desired, and building out the structure of the stem. I designed a quarter of the coloring book (as did each member of our team), and helped create the final presentation for our partners.
Our Partners:
The primary community partner for this project was the Beth-El Center homeless shelter in Milford, CT. Our project resulted in a potential design for a portable bathroom light their children could use during the night and a ready-to-use coloring book to help become acquainted with the shelter.
We were also incredibly fortunate to also get to work with Dr. Megan Goslin, a clinical psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center. Dr. Goslin provided us with invaluable information about the trauma children in homeless shelters endure, identifying what types of experiences to promote or minimize. Our project would not have been able to succeed without her guidance and advice.
Researching and Interviewing
We knew that we weren't experts in the field, and started our project by doing a lot of background research on the state of homlessness in New Haven.
We also reached out to local experts, to further our knowledge. We held several meetings with Dr. Goslin from the Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center. She gave us a workshop on trauma in childhood, answered a number of interview questions, and gave us some pointers on what makes the biggest impact on children in traumatic situations. She also helped us understand what we could help with as designers, and what topics needed to be handled by professionals.
Our biggest takeaways were that children need to feel like their parents are in control, and need to feel like they have their own space. This matched what the staff at the Beth-el center had described when they talked about the goals of their program.
Interviews with Staff
The goal of the Beth-el staff was to focus on the parents. Rules for children were set by their parents, and children needed to be supervised by their care-givers at all times. However, the staff wanted the children to feel more comfortable and at home in the space, without undermining the parents as authority figures. The staff wanted to make sure that the kids still felt like part of a family unit, but also had an opportunity to play, get homework help, and live their lives.
We also learned a lot about the shelter itself, and how it was run:
We learned that the ages of the kids vary wildly, but most families had more then one child. In this particular shelter the kitchen and play areas were shared by all, and sometimes kids will fight over toys.
There is an outside playground, but the staff said that it was rarely used. This is partly due to the weather, but also because the parents (who are required to watch the kids at all times) were busy with other work and didn't have time to sit outside with their kids.
The staff also mentioned that the intake process was probably the hardest on the kids. The children were often shut out of their homes very unexpectedly, or had been living on the street. These moves could be at any time of night, whenever the parents heard that they had a spot at the shelter. The parents had piles of paperwork to fill out immediately upon arrival, and the kids are expected to sit in the waiting room quietly. In fact the staff said that the kids often vary between two extremes. They either sat quietly staring blankly at the wall, or were running all over the front room as they act out.
Surveys With The Kids
Because the kids were underage, and a sensitive population, we couldn't interview the kids directly. Instead we created survey questions and asked the parents to answer them with their kids.
The Questions:
We used the information the staff provided to design questions for the kids and for their parents.
The Takeaways:
The kids found it hard to adjust to the new schedule. They got lots of help with homework, and got to stay at their original schools. The kids liked to play outside when the weather was nice, and think there are enough toys at the shelter. They liked superheros, princess, and Spiderman in particular.
The kids LOVED arts and crafts projects and wished there were more opportunities to color and make things. The kids often had trouble with the new rules of the center (needing to have supervision at all time) and were often timid around the staff.
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Insights:
Our team used all of our research to identify the two main pain points in the children's experience. We brainstormed possible solutions around the following two experiences:
The Introduction Process
One potential solution would focus on helping children become used to the shelter more quickly. New environments can certainly be scary for children especially when they are filled with strangers. We wanted to help children understand the physical space of the shelter, the people who lived and worked in it, and any important rules or reminders.
Bed Wetting Due to Lack of Comfort
The second thing we wanted to address was the bed wetting issue that many children in the shelter exhibited. After talking with Dr. Gosling and staff, we deduced that the issue was caused by children not wanting to go to the bathroom tonight. We wanted to find a way to make children more comfortable with getting up to go to the bathroom at night, despite the environment and shared bathroom situation.
Brainstorming
We took these two pain points and brainstormed possible solutions. Ideas included: build your own treasure chests, an all weather playground, a bulliten board with staff pictures and fun facts, etc.
We selected our favorites, built out scale models, and presented them to our community partners. With them we walked through a matrix that allowed us to decide not only what would make the biggest impact on our users, but what was also within our skill level, timeline and budget.
The loved the idea of both the coloring book and the night light, and we moved forward with both ideas by creating full scale prototypes.
Both Dr. Goslin and the Beth-el staff were invaluable in helping us refine our ideas. The staff helped us pick rules and procedures that the kids should learn about on their first day, and Dr. Goslin helped design pages that would let the kids talk about themselves. Dr. Goslin helped us discuss the bed wetting problem, and tactics we could use to help make the kids more comfortable in their space and there for less likely to regress. Primarily we focused on giving the kids a nightlight that would let them "own" their space even after hours.
Prototyping
The Coloring Book:
We had discussed various options that would have helped make the children more comfortable in their new environment such as a “Who’s Who” board. We decided early on that a coloring book about the Beth-El Center would be the best approach because it is cost effective and easy to update in the future.
Each page would describe a different part of the shelter, introduce a person in the shelter, or help explain a rule or provide a reminder. Once we nailed down what we wanted from this coloring book, we got started creating a proof of concept prototype.
We started by sketching the book by hand, and then used Adobe Illustrator to transform real pictures of the Beth-el Center into line drawings that could be colored in.
We incorporated games and hand drawn sketches into our coloring book. In addition to introducing the kids to the staff this coloring book could be an activity that could distract the kids during their intro session (where they normally are expected to stay quiet in the front room while their parent fills out paper work).
Night Lights:
After closely examining the situation with the bed wetting, it was apparent that part of the issue was that the children were scared of walking through the hallways alone at night. This, on top of regressive symptoms that result from trauma, meant that bed wetting happened often. We noted that the commercial style lighting was very bright especially for anyone who had just woken up, and that most kids didn't want to wake up other people to go to the bathroom alone.
We tested a number of different geometries, all of which were designed as plants (because they were gender neutral and could sit on a windowsill nicely). We then learned to create circuits with rechargeable batteries, and devised a circuit where the light in the leaf would be turned off while charging on its stand and turn on when removed from the charger.
We used a thermoformer and thermoplastic to create the leaves for the final prototype, and wired up two working prototypes.
The final design featured a leaf easy for a child sized hand to hold, a soft and comforting glow when the light was turned on, and a rechargeable battery and dock setup that used magnets, to ensure that the lamps would be easy to use and maintain.
