Purpose
The NYC Department of Social Services’ Human Resources Administration (DSS/HRA), in partnership with the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, sought to reframe how public-facing services are designed, delivered, and improved. The city aimed to establish a Social Service Innovation Center (SSIC): a transdisciplinary convening platform to coordinate innovation across agencies and embed human-centered, collaborative practices into public systems. 3×3 partnered with DSS/HRA to design the SSIC roadmap as foundational infrastructure for a more connected, responsive, and learning-oriented public service ecosystem. The goal was to move from siloed service delivery toward a coordinated community care network model, one that strengthens feedback loops, builds internal capacity, and supports sustained collaboration across departments and stakeholders.
Community-centered approach
3×3 conducted a landscape assessment and a series of strategic workshops with a variety of public and private stakeholders to develop the vision, mission, and operational roadmap for the Social Service Innovation Center (SSIC) that would serve as a model for driving co-creation and human-centered approaches to social service delivery as well as driving organizational learning through service delivery. Participation
The SSIC was designed through participatory engagement across multiple levels of the public service ecosystem. Engagement included strategic workshops with City agency leadership and staff, cross-sector convenings with public and private partners, stakeholder mapping across service delivery systems, iterative roadmap feedback sessions, and co-design input from staff engaged in frontline service delivery.
Impact
The SSIC established durable infrastructure for coordinated care across NYC’s social service ecosystem. The key impact areas identified as part of the mission included (a) expanding the city agency client’s ability to build feedback loops to inform continuous improvement and an agile service design system; (b) creating a resource repository including free tools, lessons learned, and training opportunities on innovation disciplines and seeding peer-to-peer learning circles for staff to support each other in self-directed learning; and (c) streamlining interagency partnerships through an incentive model that enables more effective interagency cooperation and long-term partnerships. SSIC functions as connective infrastructure within NYC’s broader community care network, aligning public agencies, frontline staff, and residents around shared learning, coordinated service delivery, and long-term institutional resilience.
Our team worked with HRA/DSS as the implementation partner to develop the SSIC intra-agency knowledge hub and provide project management and technical assistance to operationalize the roadmap with a focus on launching a lived experience panel that transforms business processes for conducting user research in order to elicit ongoing cooperation and co-creation. 3×3 also supported the relaunch of a city-wide peer learning forum on design-led innovation approaches.
