The D:Lab is a hub for creative changemakers. It creates positive social change by bringing together a diverse group of people who are interested in creating positive social change themselves. In this pursuit, the D:Lab has engaged in a series of partnerships with students and faculty, recruited driven students to lead its own in-house projects, and partnered with innovative external businesses. The projects that the D:Lab supports are carefully selected based on its mission, and care is taken to make sure that each partnership is productive and rewarding.
As a socially-oriented organization, the D:Lab has always sought to create partnerships with projects and businesses that have a social mission. When assessing potential partners, the D:Lab uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a guideline and makes sure that each project or business in question aligns with at least one of them. This helps the D:Lab make sure its efforts and resources are directed at some of the complex, “wicked” problems that that global community is trying to solve.
It is also important for the D:Lab to consider the development stage of potential project and business partners. For the D:Lab’s resources to be most effective, they must be operational already, but not so large or advanced that D:Lab resources would be redundant and better invested somewhere else. The D:Lab uses certain criteria in order to identify projects and partners at the ideal stage of development. For student projects, projects leads must have done some preliminary research and gained a solid understanding of the project space. This is determined through interviews between prospective leads and D:Lab management. Projects must also have clearly identified goals and a well thought-out timeline for accomplishing them.
The D:Lab places a high premium on multidisciplinary collaboration. While this is not necessarily required for the D:Lab to create a new partnership, the D:Lab will often encourage partners to bring new members onto their teams from diverse backgrounds. Many members have found that some of their most meaningful and powerful experiences in the D:Lab have come from collaborating with people from other faculties, with new insights often arising from unexpected places. By placing students with diverse sets of skills, experiences, and ways of thinking on the same project, the D:Lab encourages creativity and arrives at more diverse outcomes than it otherwise would.
With the selection process done and projects chosen, new D:Lab members are welcomed into the community. Beyond a warm welcome, the D:Lab supports its projects, partners, and community in many ways.
The D:Lab works closely with project leads to develop a support system that is suited to them. The D:Lab is quite flexible with project leads given their busy lives and other extra-curricular activities, so the nature of support often differs from project to project. One constant, however, is regular meetings with D:Lab management. These meetings are designed to shape the strategy of projects, address problems that the project may be experiencing, and hold leads accountable to project timelines. Providing productive encouragement and a system of accountability helps leads stay on track and accomplish the goals they set out for themselves. The D:Lab aims to foster a strong community, and helping leads achieve their goals is a major way to accomplish this.
The D:Lab also has its own in-house media department that handles photography, videography, social media, and publications. Each of these departments is lead by students who are motivated by both the innovative work of the D:Lab and their respective media-related roles. They are passionate about increasing their skills and producing high-quality content that helps D:Lab projects and partners put their best foot forward. The result is high-quality marketing and media content for D:Lab projects and partnerships.
The D:Lab is committed to providing members and project leads with opportunities to network, gain skills, and develop. In fact, it has an entire department dedicated to this. The Outreach department seeks out opportunities for D:Lab members to present their projects at conferences, partner with industry, and travel around Ghana and abroad to network with other creative problem-solvers. The Outreach team also seeks out and creates new partnerships with industry, allowing D:Lab members to act as consultants on a range of innovative, industry-led projects.
The combined support that the D:Lab offers to its projects and partnerships helps them to flourish and succeed. In doing so, the D:Lab is constantly seeking to produce positive social change. It gives its members freedom to participate however they would like, and supports them in developing valuable skills and experience, no matter their role. By bringing together a diverse, multidisciplinary group of self-motivated people, the D:Lab helps to create positive social change in its community.