Our team includes collaborators with diverse backgrounds and varied skills — united by the same people-first approach.
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Brand and Social Impact Strategist
Tandiwe’s curiosity—about other cultures, industries, and disciples—is her secret sauce. Her approach has always been to eschew the familiar and embrace the unknown, a lesson she credits to her favorite book, A More Beautiful Question. Whether she’s working with multinational companies, early-stage businesses, or social impact organizations, Tandiwe centers imagination to unlock new opportunities, align ambitions, and achieve meaningful outcomes. What is challenged through your work?
What is challenged by your work? I believe in the transformative potential of design principles and creative thinking to enhance the value of any idea or objective. I strive to find imaginative ways to align ambitions and achieve meaningful outcomes.
Collaborated on: UNICEF PET Global Consultations, UNICEF WCAR Contextualized Playbook to Address Harmful Practices
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Senior Design Researcher & Facilitator
Ranju's approach to crafting last mile solutions for communities is rooted in the values of humility, empathy, and curiosity. She is an expert at designing and implementing scalable service innovations in community health systems for sustained impact. Throughout her professional journey, Ranju has been honing that expertise by taking big risks and jumping in with all heart. She founded a community health program in rural Nepal, started the first digital health program for female community health volunteers there, and led it through to scale. Ranju is also one of the founding members of Medic's design team, a non-profit specializing in digital health.
What is challenged through your work?
Systems that expect people to work for them as opposed to systems working for people.Collaborated on:
Creating Demand for Health Services in India and Pakistan with UNICEF.
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Senior Design Researcher
Solving problems in unexpected ways is Yvonne’s specialty. Named a Master of Design by Fast Company, you can find Yvonne working on problems that really matter with teams that can make change happen. After realizing that women made 80% of all purchasing decisions but only made up 15% of the design industry, Yvonne started Femme Den and continues to consider gender in developing compelling and functional solutions to complex design problems.
What is challenged through your work?
Expected Norms. Go wide and try everything because the best ideas only come after 100 bad ideas.Collaborated on:
HCD Scale-Up with UNICEF Tanzania; HCD Scale-Up with UNICEF South Sudan; Ideation Workshop for Game Changers Coalition
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Research facilitator & Behavioral Scientist
Bhakti’s favorite words are ‘what’ and ‘why’. She believes that combined, these two words have the capacity to uncover the most complex human insights and lead to holistic problem-solving. Bhakti’s career has been shaped by her commitment to creating meaningful impact, guided by her fascination with the realms of Psychology and Design. Where some research pick a lane between qualitative and quantitative, Bhakti comfortably navigates numbers and words to arrive at insights and translate them into creative interventions for social impact. In South Asia, she learned that involving end-users and stakeholders at every stage of the design process ensured tangible, actionable touch-points that can truly make a difference.
What is challenged through your work?
Putting theory before reality and its unique context. Theories make for great starting points but all problems exist in unique contexts that demand a tailored approach. Staying flexible is key!
Collaborated on:
Incorporating behavioral science techniques and insights into research plans for ESARO focusing on demand for immunization with UNICEF.
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Facilitator & cultural strategist
Edward is an empathetic researcher, facilitator, and storyteller. A particular theme underlies the story of his career thus far—a penchant for questioning modern culture with a fascination for its historical underpinnings and a natural talent for bringing understanding into every space he enters. Edward applies his experience in both visual and verbal realms to cultural analysis and inclusion. By facilitating others’ capacity to act from a place of patience and understanding, Edward leads teams to experience the world around them as fertile ground for shaping their own culture.
What is challenged through your work?
Limitations. Imagining solutions based on existing constraints instead of new possibilities and futures.Collaborated on:
A Human-Centered Approach to Global Procedures for UNICEF’S PET; Creating Demand for Health Services in ESAR with UNICEF; Co-creation sessions for private-public partnerships for resilience in LAC
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Organizational Strategist & Facilitator
The complex tapestry of the human experiences overwhelms many, but Liz harnesses its richness to reveal opportunities for social impact. After meeting Daniel Goleman and co-developing a curriculum for emotional intelligence, Liz solidified her purpose: to facilitate growth on the inner, inter and outer levels for business and individuals by helping people connect with and through the story of their full humanity. Her podcast, First Person Plural, unpacks the systems we’re a part of, examines how they affect our lives and choices, and suggests ways to create an emotionally intelligent future.
What is challenged through your work? Black and white thinking; it isn't until we can see the whole picture that we can figure out how and where to have a meaningful impact and create change.
Collaborated on: SBC + HCD Curriculum for UNICEF ESAR (Kenya, Botswana, Malawi & Zambia); Global Knowledge Management Strategy for UNICEF’s Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management (OLKM) team; Lambda Legal audience research; Kenya Triple Threat Analysis
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Social Innovation & Human-
Centered Design StrategistFor Natalia, the beauty of human-centered design is its ability to break silos. Her approach to work relies on a simple truth: collective change happens through collective action, and collective action requires effective, collaborative partnerships. From international NGOs to local leaders, Natalia gathers diverse expertise to solve common community challenges—malaria, nutrition, immunization, menstrual health and more. At home in Colombia, she championed sustainable menstrual products by designing effective social media campaigns and forging meaningful B2B alliances with NGOs. Forging unique, unexpected, and uncommon connections is what makes Natalia a great strategist, facilitator, and communicator.
Natalia holds a Masters in Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures from University of the Arts London and a Bachelors in Industrial Design, Design and Applied Arts from Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.
Q: What is challenged through your work? Stretching beyond the limits of familiarity to effectively connect with people and convey the ideas I aspire to impart.
Collaborated on: LAC Capacity Building, HCD for Immunization in South Sudan
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Brand Strategist & Copywriter
Reema’s M.O. is to learn at least one new thing each day so she can strengthen her cross-cultural library of experiences and understanding in pursuit of creating shared understanding. Her global perspective has been honed over years of travel and career in marketing and branding that has taken her all over the world—Singapore, Dubai, Germany, Paris, and her home in India. In 2021, she had the honor of being on India’s Top 30 under 30 list for talented individuals in the Media and Advertising ecosystem by Impact Magazine.
What is challenged through your work?
Complexity in an already chaotic world.Collaborated on:
Communication and Social Media Strategies
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Senior Design Researcher
Nicolas uses quantitative and qualitative research to identify the critical knowledge needed to design, implement, and evaluate innovative solutions. Change is central to Nicolas’s work — understanding people’s decision-making, their motivations, and their paths to action by alternating the best of the academic and practitioner world. With a background in Anthropology and a Ph.D. in Sociology of Law, Nicolas has learned to pay attention to the particularities of each context instead of searching for a silver bullet. He finds innovative and tailored solutions by challenging assumptions, listening carefully, and giving credit to the experience of others.
What is challenged through your work?
Stasis. Small positive changes can have a significant impact when enabled over critical junctures of larger systems. They can tackle key issues, unleash rippled effects, and provide actors with enough agency to reshape the structures in which they are embedded.
Collaborated on:
Co-facilitated workshops on Human-Centered Design and Behavioral Insights to support immunization demand among hard-to-reach communities
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Creative Director, Digital Design and Immersive Technology
It can be a challenge to push past design limits or constraints, but Jenny is undeterred in her pursuit of commercial art that inspire awe. If you ask her (and we agree), great work is demonstrated by empathetic and emotionally-intelligent approaches to problem-solving, not an overemphasis on tactical solutions. Empathy is the critical differentiator between work that is fleeting or unmemorable and work that makes a meaningful impact. These days, Jenny lends her incredible talents to digital design and immersive technology—more specifically, “Digital Experience Design,” or DxD for short. Here, she injects a human-centered approach that helps others navigate ambiguity and complexity to launch something novel and desirable.
What is challenged through your work?
Ephemerality. I like to focus on work that anticipates a variety of needs, cuts through the noise, and doesn’t stop at the immediate goal. It's about triggering all of our senses and making someone feel like they are the only one that matters for a moment.Collaborated on:
Nuclear Narrative website; Human Centered Design for Health
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Design researcher and visual designer
Anuja makes dense and complicated information more accessible (and beautiful). From experimenting with new forms of storytelling to share truth during elections to creating a portal to shed light on recycling afterlife of household waste, Anuja strives to end biases on a global level while remaining receptive and agile on a personal level. Her award-winning work begins in teams with a solid foundation of trust, support and care while handling internal and client relationships.
What is challenged through your work?
Power imbalance. We need more information symmetry and less gate-keeping!Collaborated on:
UNICEF Disaster Relief Strategy in the East Asia Pacific Region, UNICEF Programme Implementation Handbook
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Lead Researcher and Analyst (Cognitive Sciences)
Liza uses the tools of psychology for social innovation. A consumer psychologist with a passion for making data more human, Liza utilizes cognitive models of thought and clinical communication techniques within an understanding of social psychology to consider the mental, emotional, and social dimensions of ideas, products, brands and categories. This human-centered, multi-faceted approach results in meaningful insights and strategies that reflect behavior and predict motivation. When in doubt, Liza revisits the data to help teams communicate meaningfully with their audiences.
What is challenged through your work? Misunderstandings. This is usually the result of oversimplified models of other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Collaborated on:
SBC + HCD Curriculum for UNICEF ESAR (Kenya, Botswana, Malawi & Zambia); Global Knowledge Management Strategy for UNICEF’s Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management (OLKM) team; Lambda Legal audience research; Kenya Triple Threat Analysis
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Design director
Saloni creates functional, beautiful visual systems rooted in strategy. As a designer, Saloni delivers sophisticated, timeless aesthetics as her work is rooted deeply in brand strategy and extensive visual research. Her approach has yielded high-concept, culturally relevant, lasting designs for brand identities, campaigns, products, websites, packaging and print publications for companies around the world. Saloni’s work in communications, identity design and packaging design has received recognition and won awards from Print Regional Design Awards, Graphic Design USA, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DY Works and MIT Institute of Design, where she graduated with a degree in Graphic Design.
Collaborated on: BreadAlone Identity, BeechWood Brand & Visual Strategy, Pepsi Design & Innovation, Unilever RISE Identity
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Senior Designer Researcher & Facilitator
Dianna is on a mission to reshape organizations’ thinking and practices by bringing the experiences of the people who are closest to the problem to the forefront. Dianna’s focus has always been on the "how" of design, which she believes lies at the very heart of a human-centered process. From spearheading the expansion of the Medic Mobile design team across 5 countries, to becoming certified as a mind-body coach, Dianna is a firm believer in trusting the process so that new insights and possibilities have the opportunity to emerge.
What is challenged through your work?
Thoughts of "I'm not a designer." Everyone can bring more empathy, creativity and experimentation to their work.Collaborated on:
Creating Demand for Health Services in ESAR with UNICEF; Co-Creation of a Playbook to Address FGM & Child Marriage in WCAR with UNICEF.
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Social Behavior Change Specialist & Facilitator
Driven by an unwavering pursuit of passion and curiosity, Amel’s career has been an odyssey across continents, threading together diverse experiences that shape her expertise today. Her journey began with a leap from London to New York, transcending boundaries to delve into behavioral science's application in public health policy under a Columbia University professor.
Her expertise lies in discerning what works, where, and for whom—crafting solutions that intertwine utility and desire. A guiding principle she champions is the art of listening, learning, and growing through others' insights.
What do you try to challenged through your work?
Driving change by questioning conventions:, pushing for innovative approaches, and inspiring partners, individuals and clients to embrace uncharted solutions.
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Social Futurist & Foresight Strategist
Tameka thrives where others don’t — the blinking cursor on a blank page, the challenges with no blueprint or precedent. In a world whose capitalistic and corporate structures were designed to exclude marginalized groups, Tameka seeks empowerment. As an associate professor at Columbia University, an experienced marketing professional, and a graduate with a Master’s of Science in Information Strategy and Knowledge Management, her work remains centered on co-creation—the collaborative development of meaningful futures for all.
What is challenged through your work?
Conventions: The conventional norms and practices of organizations and the narratives they hold of the future.Collaborated on:
Audience research focused on the future of entertainment through Black audience lenses.
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Facilitator and Communications Specialist
Gabby uses strategic communications and storytelling to amplify community voices. With a Masters of Science in Journalism Innovation from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, Gabby knows how to work scrappy, adapt to the breakneck speed of technological innovation, and wrap it all in diversity, equity, inclusion. Practice in deep listening and essential distillation make up her special sauce of gumption, gravitas and drive to propel her forward.
What is challenged through your work?
Disconnection. The future requires that humanity and emotional intelligence be at the center of how we communicate, build community, and create connections with our audiences.
Collaborated on:
Audience research and tool building for Lambda Legal
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HCD Facilitator
Martins is always looking to the future — building better systems for communities and the next generation of leaders. As President of YouLead project, he specializes in training, mentoring and inspiring a team of 80+ youth volunteers across Nigeria to develop professional skills and competencies. He has accompanied Firsthand in both South Sudan and Nigeria, offering his enthusiastic facilitation style and showcasing his dedication to designing effective health systems and building safer communities for adolescents. Currently, Martins is based in London studying for the MSc Public Health for Development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.What is challenged through your work?
The power dynamics that determine how healthcare outputs are regulated. To prioritize equitable research, decisions, and partnerships from planning to implementation of interventions, we must listen to the stories behind the data collected.Collaborated on:
UNICEF HCD Scale-Up (South Sudan); UNICEF SBC Playbook to Address Harmful Practices (Nigeria)
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Grant writer, Project manager
Brice is a master of balancing acts, from handling inevitable minor emergencies to crafting precise excel sheets and managing project logistics.
Whether he is meticulously cultivating vanilla (a passion he picked up while living in Côte d’Ivoire) or organizing field research with communities in Kinshasa, Brice is on top of every detail.
Collaborated on: HCD Scale Up in DRC, UNICEF WCARO Playbook to address harmful practices