Designing with, not For, DC.

Our toolkit walks you through the steps needed to equitably design a solution to a problem facing DC students.

Entrepreneur Toolkit: Methods for Equitable Innovation in Education

CityBridge programming rests on a foundation of dynamic workshops, relationship-based coaching, and tools for capturing the learning generated through an equitable design process. This toolkit offers some of the most-used tools from across our programs. It is intended to provide a window into the specific work of our programs, allow teams to try the tools on their own, and share knowledge with others.

A key text that underpins much of CityBridge’s work is equityXdesign: a practice for transformation, by Caroline Hill, Michelle Molitor, and Christine Ortiz. We suggest that anyone engaging with these tools read this important paper.

Tools to Build Empathy and Understanding

In order to design new approaches to challenges in schools, we have to center the experience of students, families, and educators—and build or remake relationships with them.

Define Problems and Articulate a Theory of Change

How we define problems matters. We offer tools that help designers get clear and specific about the problem they are trying to solve, to generate better solutions.

Plan and Learn from Pilots

At CityBridge, we believe that piloting is a core practice for equity-centered design. Pilots are experiments, big and small, that are systematically designed to answer a set of questions.

Like many great tools and technologies, the documents we offer here owe much to others built by brilliant colleagues, partners, and organizations in the field.

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