Social Impact & Innovation

Working closely with partners and the people they serve to reveal the roots of a problem and design a better solution

About

Jane Ouillette is a skilled facilitator, developmental evaluator, strategist, and service designer based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She has more than a decade of experience using participatory research and design to include people most impacted by a change in the problem-solving and solution-finding process. She brings a creative and curious process that is custom to each project, adapted to the context, and proven to bring renewed perspective, ideas, and action.

Clients & Collaborators

What I do

I work with organizations navigating complex social challenges, such as food insecurity, community health & wellness, and employment inequity to build capacity for engaging people, understanding problems, and implementing solutions

  • I carefully design engaging workshops and discussions that support listening, conversation, and eventual clarity. Examples include:

    • Helping coalitions work together to create a shared vision

    • Building strong relationships and consensus decision-making with a steering committee of community members with lived experience

  • We work together to capture the your work through the lens of many people who are impacted, then use the new insights to inform, adapt, and build a narrative of your impact. For example:

    • Drafting an evaluation strategy and coaching the team to lead data gathering and sense-making

    • Facilitating a workshop series to teach Developmental Evaluation methods to a team, using relatable examples and experiential opportunities

  • I take a strengths-based, intentional, and collaborative approach to enabling organizations to learn and hear from partners and people with lived experiences. This includes:

    • Designing and creating the materials for a team to gather insights and perspectives in ways that are engaging and reveal compelling narratives.

    • Conducting research with a broad range of people with lived experience, using visuals, storytelling, and dialogue to inform a program or service gap or idea.

  • I co-facilitate design processes with partners and the people they serve to develop creative & evidence-based solutions. I also help test the ideas being generated to understand how expectations meet reality. This includes:

    • Leading an iterative process following human-centred design methods to gathering insights, facilitating generative discussions, and refining ideas.

    • Testing a small-scale pilot to better understand the potential outcomes for people who interact with it, and operational impacts for making a change.

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Projects

My strength is facilitating a creative & experimental process to shift public services and community-based programs to be more inclusive, useful, and sustainable with people’s real needs at their heart.

Capturing youth experiences of the NS School Lunch Program

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Using past and future case studies to learn about developmental evaluation

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Coaching a coalition to build a collective voice for systems change

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All Projects