Loneliness is on the rise in teens and young adults. Students at colleges and universities around the country are dropping out and citing social isolation as a key reason for leaving. Grit Digital Health and Hopelab, a social impact foundation from San Francisco, sought an answer on how to tackle this growing mental health issue through the lenses of science and design. What emerged is Nod, an app that helps college students build social skills and push beyond their comfort zones.

Join us to explore the many pivots, large and small, that emerged through our product design lifecycle. What role did our "north star” hypothesis play in guiding the decisions along the way? How did we leverage behavior design principles to encourage social experimentation? Explore these and other questions as we prepare for a pilot launch in late September 2019.

This event will begin with a short presentation and will be followed by a panel of team members across Grit Digital Health and Hopelab. The session will culminate with happy hour and networking at that Cactus offices.

Panelists:

Chris McCarthy - VP Strategy & Design, Hopelab
Chris McCarthy is the Vice President of Strategy & Design at Hopelab where he is excited to deepen its impact on the health and wellness of young people through design and systems thinking. He is also the Executive Director and Founder of the Innovation Learning Network.

His work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review (Sept 2010), Bisognano and Kenney’s “Pursuing the Triple Aim: Seven Innovators Show the Way to Better Care, Better Health, and Lower Costs” (2012) as well as FastCompany, the New York Times and many more. In his previous role at Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, he tackled safer medication administration for patients, more robust shift changes for nurses, exploring the social space of elders, and the care experience of transgender people.

As an author, he collaborated with Lyle Berkowitz, MD on “Innovation with Information Technologies in Healthcare” (2012), and with Lisa Schilling on Schall’s “Spreading Improvement Across Your Health Care Organization” (2007). You can find his quirky design blog at McCarthyChris.com. He was named the 2015 H.I.T. Innovator and the 2011 Ellerbe Beckett Lecturer. And is an international speaker on innovation and design.

Chris has a master’s in business administration from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / Copenhagen Business School, and a master’s in public health in Health Policy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In his spare time, he obsesses about fitness and an occasional doughnut.

Caroline Fitzgerald - Project Lead, Hopelab
Caroline’s favorite work moments are when the right process combines with the right people to yield unanticipated possibilities. She works on our project team weaving together tools from systems thinking, human centered design, and research to take our understanding of problems and solutions to new places. Before Hopelab, Caroline worked for nine years as an Occupational Therapist alongside people with serious mental illness. For those of you who like a scientific analyses a well-validated tool has determined- curiosity, fairness, and hope are her top character strengths.

Joe Conrad - Founder and CEO - Grit Digital Health
Joe Conrad is a creative entrepreneur and a digital health pioneer and he believes that the power of innovation and technology can solve any problem. He is the Founder and CEO at Grit Digital Health –– a team of specialists in behavioral health, wellness, technology and marketing committed to transcending barriers like stigma and access to help people get the support they need, when and how they need it.

Joe and his team are the creators of Man Therapy, an innovative and award-winning campaign that uses humor to engage working-age men and an immersive, entertaining, digital experience where therapy actually happens. In 2016 Grit Digital Health launched YOU @ College, a personal and customized well-being portal that helps students navigate life and campus.

Since 1990, Joe has led the charge at Cactus, a purpose-driven branding and creative agency with the mission of growing brands that help people thrive. Cactus has developed a reputation of one of the nation’s leading social marketing agencies by leveraging power of branding, creative and technology to make meaningful work that makes a huge impact.

Nathaan Demers - VP & Director of Clinical Programs, Grit Digital Health
Nathaan is passionate about people. This passion has led him to an enriching career as a clinical psychologist, filled with a number of twists and turns working across a variety of settings. Nathaan is an active traveler and athlete - these aspects of his life have inspired him to think beyond the traditional confines of mental health care. He strives to find innovative ways to expand the reach of mental health services to improve the lives of others. While Nathaan is fascinated by all areas of psychology, his passion lies within the positive psychology movement working specifically in preventative behavioral health.

Andrew Baker - Design and Technology Director, Grit Digital Health
Andrew's passion for using technology to create connections is contagious. In his role at Grit Digital Health, Andrew inspires and guides the development of user-centered digital solutions that deliver intuitive, rewarding experiences. With a background in experience design and front-end development, Andrew and his team strive to develop wellbeing solutions that are rooted in research, behavior design, and business strategy.

https://gritdigitalhealth.com
https://hopelab.org