Discrimination against housing choice vouchers is among the most common forms of illegal housing bias in NYC. When renters with vouchers inquire about a listing, landlords and brokers often unlawfully deny or ignore them. Discrimination against low-income and homeless renters with vouchers prolongs (or even causes) homelessness, exacerbates segregation, excludes families from high-opportunity areas, and impacts physical and mental health. At Unlock NYC, we build mobile technology that makes it easier to identify, record, and report unfair treatment during the housing search process – and hold discriminators accountable.

After completing Blue Ridge Labs' 2019 interdisciplinary summer fellowship as a Design Fellow, I joined the 2019-2020 Catalyst cohort. The Catalyst program at Blue Ridge Labs selects early-stage mission-driven startups that could improve the lives of low-income New Yorkers and helps founders turn a proven concept into a scalable technology platform. Our team worked on Unlock NYC (weunlock.nyc), a tool to unlock more doors for New Yorkers by catching landlords in the act of housing discrimination.

In this role, a collaboration between the MICA Center for Social Design and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, I taught a graduate-level studio course on the fundamentals of human-centered design, public health, and community-based research to art and design students from a variety of disciplines. Our focus in the Fall 2018 semester was a program called Community Aging in Place—Advancing Better Living for Elders (CAPABLE), which strengthens senior citizens' ability to thrive at home by prioritizing and supporting their personal goals.

During the 2018 spring semester, I collaborated with the Associate Director of the MICA Center for Social Design as a teaching assistant and researcher for a graduate-level studio on redesigning asthma care for low-income children in Baltimore. My role included managing our partnership with physicians at a local hospital, coaching students during class activities, managing IRB / ethics approval processes for research, and developing and teaching modules in qualitative interviewing, synthesis, storytelling, and social determinants of health.

As a product designer, I developed user flows and high-fidelity wireframes for new features in emocha’s core product, an app and web portal to help people take their medications consistently and on time. I also researched social determinants of health that could impact product usability and desirability.

As a Project Manager at Dalberg Advisors, I worked with teams of strategy consultants and designers tackling social challenges around the world, from entrepreneurship in Haiti to adolescent health in Nigeria. Outside of my project work in our global health and policy & advocacy practice areas, I launched Dalberg Story Lab, an initiative to build our staff's skills in authentic, narrative-driven storytelling.Over the course of four years at Dalberg, I started as an Analyst, and moved through Associate Consultant, Consultant, and Senior Consultant prior to joining the management cohort as a Project Manager. In 2015, I was awarded a short-term Service Sabbatical to focus on my work with Pasand. In 2016, I spent a year as the first Program Manager of Safe Surgery 2020, an initiative that imagines and creates a world where surgery is safe, affordable, and accessible for everyone. Dalberg serves as secretariat for this initiative, with key partners including GE Foundation, Harvard, Jhpiego, and others. Learn more at www.safesurgery2020.org.

At Pasand, we believe that the best health education programs are designed with — rather than simply for — young people. Our programs, resources, and trainings support health educators to confidently launch or improve engaging, accurate, and approachable health programs at their institutions. I served on Pasand's board, and engaged in short-term projects in human-centered design and storytelling.

• Interviewed and surveyed over 100 leaders in development and ran data analyses to co-produce a best practices guide for multidisciplinary policy teams in emerging markets• Released a report on poverty reduction and entrepreneurship• Provided feedback and contributed editing to research papers prior to external distribution