Our team worked with FICA to help them identify opportunity areas in their service offering and devise other product and/or service propositions that could extend FICA’s impacts beyond providing access to housing for low-income families as FICA also strives to help empower these families to break from the cycle of poverty and to have an overall better quality of life. We focused on FICA’s “Single-Family Apartments” project rather than trying to work on FICA's overall programs. As we had 1.5 months to work on our project, we decided to focus more on the research and recommendation part without striving to implement the recommendations.
FICA is a non-profit social organization founded in 2015 to make housing rentals possible for low-income families in the center of São Paulo, Brazil. FICA believes there is an alternative to the market, so it dedicates its work to protecting land and properties from housing price speculation, gentrification, eviction, and the disregard for environmental preservation efforts. FICA strives for equal access to land and property resources by building alternative models to the traditional real estate market and working with collaborators who care about the issue of housing justice.
Land and property are expensive assets concentrated in the hands of the privileged few. FICA believes there is an alternative to the market and strives to work toward equal access to land and property.
Interview & service blueprint mapping
Our team did a stakeholder interview with some of the FICA’s staff, but mostly with Fabiana Endo, who is an institutional coordinator and project manager at FICA, to understand the process FICA has in buying/renting properties as well as finding tenants, who they’re partnering with, and the challenges they’re currently facing. We also did some secondary research to learn more about the housing landscape in São Paulo, Brazil, the history of the land, as well as some housing regulations in the area.
Our team developed a service blueprint based on the interview that mapped out the Tenant Application and Tenants' Move-In process. We had several meetings with the FICA team to clarify our understanding and asked them to participate in sharing their perspectives on the service blueprint process itself because they’re the ones who had
Service Improvement Recommendation
After we worked on the service blueprint map and presented it to the FICA team, we came up with some recommendations. Some of the recommendations we came up with were more on the strategic direction the FICA team can go into, while others aimed for more specific product/service recommendations. Some of the areas we looked into were the following:
We also came up with some service ideas that go beyond providing housing for families to care for their social integration into the community and how they can be empowered to be financially self-sufficient.
From the interview with FICA team members and their partner(s) we developed the service blueprint with the regular feedback from FICA team members and input from our mentor. The map tells us points of potential interventions while also being thoughtful with how it will impact overall service delivery that FICA team will do.
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The idea behind these recommendations on strategic directions and service areas to look into are not to tell FICA what to do, but instead to act as a conversation starter to explore possibilities. Therefore our group was focusing on themes of areas rather than specific product or service ideas.
Cross-country & cross-culture collaboration
Collaborating with people who reside in another country on a project specifically related to space was quite challenging because our team didn’t necessarily have enough understanding of the spatial or historical context of the project site. We learned the importance of overcommunicating and leveraging asynchronous collaboration tools to bridge cultural and linguistic differences among collaborators.
Understanding and adaptability
A lack of contextual understanding underscored the need for humility and flexibility. We remained open to feedback and perspectives from the FICA team, realizing that participatory methods were essential, especially since we were not experts in the project's local context.