Listen. Make. Test. - Tabitha Kapic of The Chalmers Center

In Episode 36 we speak with Tabitha Kapic, the Director of Innovation at the Chalmers Center. Tabitha, shares how she’s seen God’s guidance in her career path that seems to be a winding path, from a lab in Chicago, through Insurance in Florida and even working in an embassy in London, all the way to where she is now, focused on innovation and design thinking. Working at the Chalmers center she gets to work with ministries and nonprofits to address the root causes of poverty.

How Do You Tackle Complex Problems Like Poverty?

To begin to solve complex problems you need to get to the root cause. Tabitha shares that when it comes to poverty most of us believe the cause of poverty is a lack of stuff, so we try to solve it by giving people stuff. When you dig deeper, and look to scripture, you learn that at the core of poverty is broken relationships. Everyone needs four key relationships to flourish, these are relationships with:

1. God

2. Self

3. Others

4. Creation

So as you look to innovate you need to start by being with the people you are serving rather than simply serving up more stuff. 

How Does The Chalmers Center Help Ministries Engage in Poverty Alleviation?

They engage on many levels including training, research and program development. One example of this is a church who came into the innovation training with a strong idea of who they wanted to serve. They had however, overlooked that they have a very strong ministry with their preschool. While they were serving the children they had little to no connections to the families, who they only saw at drop off and pick up. As a result of using the design thinking model they decided to ask “how can we make drop off and pick up, which is typically very stressful, the best part of the day for parents?” Asking this simple question takes this church out of the realm of simply providing service, preschool, to being with the people they are serving.

Be sure to listen to the full episode, to hear Tabitha share about the design thinking model, taking it from human centered design to God centered design, how to handle failure and more.