In this case study, we’ll take a look at how the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s Strategy & Innovation team explored a new problem space and uncovered innovative opportunities for potential product development.
<aside>
AI Journey Phase: Exploration
Module: Problem Definition
About the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation:
Domain: Philanthropy
Organization Size: 11-50
Region: Global
Website: www.mcgovern.org/
</aside>
As an organization with an in-house technology team focused on building AI products for social good, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) is always exploring what solutions might best serve the needs of civil society. Upon launching our most recent product, Grant Guardian, the team kicked off an exploration into what we might build next.
We often cast a wide net during this part of the journey, seeking to understand where our efforts can have a big impact while also taking into account the AI expertise and capacity available on our team. Given a large focus of our grant portfolio has been on climate-related organizations over the past several years, we identified the climate space as a promising area of exploration. Beyond that initial idea, however, we kept our approach exploratory and remained open to unexpected directions as the research evolved.
This case study is a peek at one of the product directions that we dove into during this exploration — a solution that would promote green spaces and parks as a way to increase climate resilience and mitigate the negative effects of climate change in local communities. Although we ultimately chose not to pursue this direction for our next product, we invested dozens of hours into understanding the challenges and opportunities in this space, drawing heavily on the knowledge of community advocates who shared their time and perspective. Along the way, we surfaced insights about how AI could support community-led green space advocacy that, to our knowledge, hadn’t been pulled together elsewhere. We’re sharing our research and ideas publicly in the hopes of advancing this field, and making it easier for others to build on this work.
Through this case study, we’ll show how our team at PJMF conducted research to better understand the problems faced by park advocates, how we crafted our findings into a well-defined problem statement, and how we turned that problem statement into a set of opportunity areas and ultimately ideas for potential solutions. We’ll highlight some of the key outputs from this work throughout to illustrate how the team went about this process. For those interested in digging deeper into the findings, opportunity areas, and ideas generated, the full report is available here.
The first steps taken by our team to begin understanding the space included research to validate that green spaces in fact have a measurable impact on climate resilience and some basic landscape analysis. Though an often overlooked strategy, there is clear evidence that green spaces reduce air pollution, remove carbon from the atmosphere, mitigate extreme heat, reduce stormwater runoff, and more.
The landscape analysis we conducted was focused on:
This gave us an initial sense of the gaps in the existing solutions and the ideas that were emerging from those most active in the space. A full listing of organizations and tools that surfaced in our research is available here.
From there, we hosted a number of interviews with experts and those heavily involved in park advocacy, seeking a range of perspectives to help inform what they saw as the most pressing challenges. From local nonprofits and national groups to parks departments and grassroots advocates in rural and urban communities, each discussion added significantly to our understanding of the problem space.
Next, we were tasked with synthesizing everything we were learning from our conversations and research into a well-scoped problem statement. We wanted this to capture the core issue that prevented the adoption of green spaces as a mechanism to build climate resilience and highlight a handful of key insights that shed light on why the problem was happening.
The core problem we identified was that community park advocates often lacked robust information and tools to support them in the development or enhancement of green spaces. This problem space was backed by a number of key insights. For instance, information about quality, features, and geographic distribution of existing green space is scattered or requires in-person observation, making it challenging for advocates and planners to prioritize potential enhancement opportunities. This insight came out of several discussions where advocates expressed frustration with their ability to see the full picture of what exists in their communities. Current park databases often don’t incorporate qualitative features of parks (e.g., share structures, picnic tables, sports fields, etc).
Another insight we observed is that green space advocates struggle to effectively communicate the potential and actual benefits of green space enhancements to the various stakeholders involved. Advocates expressed that not only is it difficult to quantify and calculate the benefits, but the language used to communicate that impact and the type of benefits to emphasize can differ depending on the stakeholder. For example, advocates speaking to a city planner may need to emphasize more immediate economic benefits over long-term climate resilience.
To read the entire problem statement, including all five key insights identified, take a look at the “Opportunity areas and promising ideas” section of the full report.