Design Lab in Practice While sketching out their program’s conversion funnel and client journey maps, the team realized that there was a need to design a "pre-housing workshop" for clients who, while interested in buying a home, were not equipped with the knowledge or tools to successfully complete the process and achieve their dream. The question that design lab helped the housing team to innovatively answer was - what can we offer this client population to ensure that they are prepared to successfully purchase a home and not fall out early in the process? After interviews with staff, analysis of client data, and even interviewing Lenders from financial institutions, the team designed Mi Casa as an interactive, culturally-appropriate pre-requisite course designed for these clients to improve the likelihood of successful outcomes in the home buyer process. This multi-media, project-based learning course enhances the client’s home-buyer knowledge and financial literacy. It also helps build early rapport and trusting relationships with housing counselors which is critical to completing important steps in the pursuit of buying a home. The team's research yielded that while over 400 financial housing literacy curricula currently exist in the market, very few are concise and user friendly, and none are linguistically and culturally specific to the Latino community. Mi Casa seeks to solve this! This past March, the team took everything they learned in Design Lab and drew up a “pitch deck” to pitch their idea to one of our funders - UnidosUS (formerly NCLR) and were recently awarded $40,000 to get started, with the opportunity to get additional funds in January 2020! The team will be going to work to build prototypes of the Mi Casa modules, and running experiments with clients and staff to rapidly learn and adjust them to optimize user-friendliness and effectiveness at moving clients forward in the home buying process. This is a great example of how Design Lab can support teams with exploring their programs, identifying areas of improvement and innovation, designing creative solutions to problems, and pursuing flexible funding in order to launch them! Let's congratulate the housing team on their great work. We are excited to see Mi Casa in action! Housing Team Testimony “It was exciting for the team to take a real project through the techniques of the design lab to help us create Mi Casa. The intent was to create Mi Casa to be tailored to the community we serve with the focus of home ownership and to improve the services that Housing Counselors provide. This is one of the first projects that we were able to create based on the needs of the clients we serve and not based on what the funder required.” - Hildaliz Escalante-Nimchuk, Housing Director | 
