Investing in People-first Public Health Approaches

Design Challenge
How might we build on what’s strong and invest in community-led, people-first public health approaches that increase demand for COVID-19 vaccines?

Partners
Common Thread · Private Foundation

Project
Co-design and facilitation for a behavioral design organization engaging diverse stakeholders to develop innovative, community-driven approaches to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates in Pakistan, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Role
Strategic Design · Coaching · Facilitation

Overview
Common Thread is an emerging leader in behavioral design for global public health. The organization integrates behavioral science, design thinking, and anthropology with local expertise to create human-centered approaches to public health challenges.

In early 2022, Common Thread launched a complex multi-country initiative to strengthen vaccine demand by building on existing community assets and knowledge. I was hired to lead the team through a rapid co-design process, developing tools, frameworks, and facilitation methods to help visualize and synthesize emerging insights from the discovery phase.

These resources served a dual purpose: they were used both internally to support sensemaking and strategy development, and externally to creatively engage communities and key partners in the co-design process - ensuring that emerging solutions were people-centered, contextually grounded, and sustainable.

Examples included:

Ecosystem maps to identify key actors across public health systems.

Stakeholder frameworks to understand motivations, interests, and power dynamics.

Journey maps to surface structural, social, and behavioral barriers along the vaccine journey.

Opportunity maps to identify gaps in funding, capacity, and technical support.

Although developed specifically for this initiative, many of these tools have since been adapted and reused across Common Thread’s other projects - becoming part of the organization’s growing global toolkit for participatory, community-led health design.

Duration of Engagement
Spring 2022

“You really helped us move forward in a short amount of time - I appreciated how quickly you could download our needs and design something close to ready from there. I’m sure we’ll keep returning to your frameworks as the project progresses; you’ve given us good infrastructure to build on.”
- Sherine Guirguis, Director