Maria Alvarezbest matchRetail merchandising director (ret.)Covers merchandising + store-design; already aligned to retail revenue; 1 session this quarter.
93
skill · strategy · capacity
External Engagement Studio · MS Strategic Design & Management, Parsons · Spring 2025
The People pillar — attracting and keeping Housing Works’ next generation
Housing Works runs on a three-year strategic plan with three focus areas: People, Programs, and Innovation. We were brought in on People — staff and board recruitment, retention, and flexibility, with the goal of making Housing Works the employer and Board home of choice for the next generation. Within that, we narrowed to one question: how can Housing Works attract and keep younger staff when it can’t match private-sector pay?
The brief
Housing Works funds HIV and homelessness services through a chain of thrift stores and a bookstore. It can’t pay what companies pay, and Gen Z will soon be about a third of the workforce. The Studio paired our team with Housing Works to work its People pillar; we focused on younger staff specifically.
Our team of three split the work. Mine was the economic and competitive analysis, the survey statistics, and one of the three frameworks we delivered — a system for trustee-led workshops.
The semester
Fifteen weeks — from meeting the partner to handing over the strategy.
Field research Participatory workshop Milestone
Week numbers are approximate — the studio ran fifteen weeks, spring 2025, from the partner brief to the final strategy.
Funded by what it sells.
How we worked
We worked in four passes, and listened before we proposed anything.
- 01
Their documents first. We read Housing Works’ FY23–25 strategic plan, its FY23 financial audit, and its org charts to understand the business and where pay actually sat. Alongside that we ran a competitor analysis and a short literature review on nonprofit hiring and retention.
- 02
The sites. We visited four Housing Works locations — a thrift store, the cannabis dispensary, the Keith Cylar health center, and the bookstore — to see the work first-hand.
- 03
The people. We interviewed staff across roles, including a harm-reduction coordinator and the development team, and sat in on calls with Housing Works.
- 04
Gen Z directly. We ran an interactive poster survey across campus (127 responses) and a “Bridges and Barriers” workshop, then clustered what we heard into a short set of findings.
From the site visits
127survey responses
4site visits
4research passes
1Bridges & Barriers workshop
Workshop 01 · the Gen Z poster survey
We asked Gen Z directly — in their own space.
Rather than guess what younger workers want, we ran a participatory poster survey across three New School campuses — the University Center, the List Center, and the NSSR Library. Each board led with a provocative statistic and one open question; passersby wrote or drew straight onto a sticky-note grid.
Over about two weeks we gathered roughly 127 responses — and the posters that named “Gen Z” out loud drew the most, proof that the framing itself pulled people in.
The posters — moving through all six
Hover to pause · tap a poster to enlarge
From our Spring 2025 participatory poster survey at The New School — the cards show the real posters; the quotes are real responses, lightly trimmed for length.
The final insight
The provocative headline is what pulled people in — but the real answers were messier, and more honest. On the work-modality poster, the loud “72% prefer hybrid” settled into 52 hybrid · 23 remote · 6 in-person once people actually wrote down what they wanted.
The gap is the point: a sharp claim earns attention, but the real signal is in what people say next.
Workshop 02 · Bridges and Barriers
Mapping the bridges and the barriers.
In a sixty-minute in-person workshop, we sat six Gen Z students down to map the workplace from the ground up. On a four-level tree — volunteers at the roots, staff on the trunk, managers on the branches, leaders in the canopy — they marked the barriers younger staff hit, then the “bridges” that could carry them over.
Every proposed fix went onto an effort-versus-engagement matrix, so the high-impact, low-effort moves rose to the top. Recognition kept beating pay — as one participant put it, “It’s not even just about the pay. It’s also about being acknowledged.” Unclear career paths came up again and again, and even a TV in the break room landed as an easy win.
Those signals fed straight into our findings and proposals — especially the trustee-led workshops, where participants ranked clear career paths and mentorship as what would keep them.
How the session unfolded — tap a frame to enlarge
What it pointed to
Two workshops, the same signals — we clustered what we heard into the four findings below.
What we found
Four patterns came up again and again — and each one echoed something Housing Works had already named in its People plan. None of them were about money.
01 Hybrid autonomy and trust
Flexible scheduling read as respect. Where it was applied unevenly, staff noticed — the problem was inconsistency, not the technology.
02 Recognition and community
Staff wanted to be acknowledged, not only paid. As one put it: “It’s not even just about the pay. It’s also about being acknowledged.”
03 Procedural fairness
What mattered most wasn’t the outcome but whether the rules were applied consistently and explained. Even-handed processes built more trust than perks did.
04 Career clarity and trustee expertise
Younger staff couldn’t see the next role or how to reach it — while the board’s professional expertise sat unused.
What we proposed
We gave Housing Works three low-cost frameworks it could adopt without new headcount. Each answered one of our findings — and each mapped onto a goal Housing Works had already set in its People plan:
Hybrid Work Charter
Sharka
Gives shape to the plan’s aim to design a model for the new flexible workplace, applied consistently across roles.
Skill-Badge Passport
Pani
Serves the plan’s call for a culture of appreciation, acknowledgement, and connection, using recognition and surplus stock.
Trustee-Led Workshops
mine
Acts on the plan’s commitment to offer training and development to Board members and managers, and on its promise that it’s not just a job, it’s a career.
Together they cost under $2,700 a year.
My framework — trustee-led workshops
The system matches a staff development need against a trustee’s skills and Housing Works’ strategic priorities, then turns the match into a short, structured session: 45 minutes — a quick intro, a discussion, a hands-on sprint, and questions. Each session is recorded, summarized, and archived, so what’s taught stays with the team.
Below is a working slice of that system, as the People team would use it: an open needs queue, a matcher that scores every trustee in the open, the session itself — captured, summarized, and badged — and an archive the built-in assistant answers from.
Open staff needs
From the quarterly pulse survey — pick one to see the matcher work in the open.
Best trustee for weak visual merchandisingscored on skill fit · strategic fit · load
David ChenDigital marketing leadNo direct skill overlap — would need outside prep. Has capacity, but wrong bench.
45
skill · strategy · capacity
Marcus WebbBrand strategistNo direct skill overlap — would need outside prep. Better saved for their own lane.
23
skill · strategy · capacity
Renée ThompsonNonprofit CFO · career coachNo direct skill overlap — would need outside prep. Better saved for their own lane.
17
skill · strategy · capacity
The score is a real computation over illustrative data — not model output.
Concept prototype · illustrative data — trustees, needs, and sessions are invented stand-ins for private Housing Works dataassistant runs on a live model API via a server-side proxy
The tool above is live.
Real interactions on illustrative stand-in data: the matcher scores skill fit, strategic fit, and trustee load in the open; sessions run through the full capture loop — transcript, auto-summary, badge, archive; and the assistant answers from the archive through a real model API behind a server-side proxy. Housing Works hasn't piloted the framework — this is the proposal, made operable.
Open the prototype full-screenLimitations
A few honest caveats. Our survey leaned toward design students, the workshop was a single session, and these are proposals — Housing Works hasn’t piloted them yet. We’d suggest testing the workshops in one store before scaling them across the organization. We used AI tools to help with analysis and drafting; the fieldwork, the findings, and the decisions are ours.