Transforming the experience of 14 million people.
Client
United Way of Calgary
Government of Alberta
Sector
Non-Profit
Government
Offering
Customer Experience
In 2018, United Way of Calgary and Area and J5 Design came together around a shared belief: many of society’s most pressing challenges cannot be solved through traditional approaches alone.
While non-profits, governments, healthcare organizations, businesses, and community leaders work tirelessly to support people facing complex social challenges, many of these systems were designed to respond to immediate needs rather than address the root causes behind them. The growing complexity of issues such as mental health, housing insecurity, social isolation, caregiver burnout, poverty, and community well-being called for a different approach.
Over the last six years, J5 has worked alongside United Way as a strategic design and innovation partner, helping build and operate The Social Impact Lab into one of United Way’s signature initiatives. What began as a Calgary-based experiment has since evolved into a province-wide platform for social innovation, capacity building, and systems change..
The Challenge
Communities across Alberta are facing increasingly interconnected social challenges that cannot be solved by a single organization, sector, or funding model alone.
Many organizations responsible for delivering social services operate within environments of increasing demand, limited resources, workforce pressures, and growing complexity. While these organizations possess deep expertise and commitment, they often lack the capacity, tools, and dedicated space needed to explore new ideas, test solutions, and collaborate differently.
At the same time, people experiencing social challenges frequently interact with multiple disconnected systems, requiring them to navigate complex pathways to access support. United Way recognized an opportunity to create a new model for innovation in the social sector. The question became:
What would happen if we brought together people with lived experience, community organizations, businesses, government, philanthropists, and innovators to collaboratively design solutions to society’s most complex challenges?
“What if instead of simply meeting urgent needs, we could move from serving to solving?”
— Karen Young, CEO of United Way of Calgary and Area
The Process
As co-founders and long-term strategic partners, J5 helped envision, build, launch, and operate The Social Impact Lab alongside United Way. Our role extended beyond facilitation or consulting. Together, we helped create a new innovation infrastructure for Alberta’s social sector.
By combining United Way’s deep community relationships with J5’s expertise in service design, human-centered research, systems thinking, and innovation, the Lab became a platform where organizations could explore new ways of working, develop stronger capabilities, and rapidly test ideas before making larger investments.
Over six years, J5 supported:
Strategic visioning and design of the Social Impact Lab model
Creation of innovation methodologies and tools
Human-centered design research and ethnography
Community engagement and co-design
Systems mapping and opportunity identification
Facilitation of multi-stakeholder innovation programs
Design and delivery of social innovation training
Development of new services, programs, and business models
Innovation coaching and mentorship
Provincial scaling strategy and implementation
Together, J5 and United Way created a model that helped bridge the gap between community knowledge and innovation practice.
In the Spotify episode below, Karen Young, President & CEO of United Way of Calgary and Area, and John Vardalos, Founder & CEO of J5 Design, discuss the creation of Social Impact Lab Alberta.
Together, they share the story behind the collaboration, the challenges they faced, and the lessons they learned about bringing people together to address complex social issues. The conversation offers valuable insights into co-design, innovation, and what it takes to create meaningful and lasting community impact.
Our Process
At the heart of The Social Impact Lab was a commitment to deeply understanding the lived experiences of people navigating complex social challenges.
Every initiative began by listening.
Through interviews, observation, workshops, storytelling, journey mapping, and community engagement, the Lab worked directly alongside individuals, families, caregivers, youth, frontline workers, and community organizations to understand challenges from the perspective of those experiencing them.
This approach helped uncover barriers, unmet needs, and opportunities that are often invisible within traditional planning and policy processes.
Bringing Communities Together
Many social challenges exist between organizations rather than within them.
The Lab intentionally created spaces where diverse groups could come together to explore problems collectively, including:
Non-profit organizations
Government partners
Businesses
Donors and philanthropists
Researchers and academics
Community members
People with lived experience
By creating environments where these groups could collaborate as equals, the Lab helped uncover new perspectives and generate ideas that would not have emerged through traditional organizational structures.
Rapidly Testing New Ideas
Rather than spending years planning solutions before implementation, the Lab introduced a rapid experimentation approach rooted in service design.
Ideas were translated into prototypes, pilots, and early-stage concepts that could be tested with real users and refined through feedback.
This allowed organizations to reduce risk, build evidence, and accelerate learning while ensuring solutions remained grounded in real community needs.
Building Capacity for Long-Term Change
One of the Lab’s most important contributions was helping organizations build their own innovation capabilities.
Through coaching, workshops, mentorship, and programs such as Inspire, participants learned practical innovation and design-thinking methodologies that could be applied within their own organizations and communities.
The goal was not simply to solve individual problems, but to strengthen Alberta’s long-term capacity for social innovation.
Scaling Across Alberta
By 2022, the impact and success of the Social Impact Lab had attracted provincial attention.
Recognizing the potential of the model, the Government of Alberta invested $1.75 million over four years through the Creative Partnerships Alberta initiative to scale the Social Impact Lab across the province.
This investment represented a significant milestone in the evolution of the Lab.
The funding enabled the creation of Social Impact Lab Alberta, expanding access to innovation training, mentorship, design-thinking practices, and capacity-building programs for non-profits and social impact leaders throughout Alberta.
The initiative established regional partnerships with:
United Way of Calgary and Area
United Way of the Alberta Capital Region
United Way of Lethbridge & South Western Alberta
Together, these organizations created regional innovation hubs and community-based programming while extending support into rural and underserved communities through virtual platforms and pop-up labs.
The expansion reflected a growing recognition that innovation and human-centered design should not be limited to the private sector. Communities, non-profits, and public-serving organizations also require the tools and capabilities needed to adapt to rapidly changing social challenges.
Outcomes
The Social Impact Lab introduced a new approach to solving social challenges by combining community expertise, lived experience, systems thinking, and human-centred design into a repeatable model for innovation.
Province-Wide Capacity Building
Through the Alberta expansion, innovation and design-thinking practices became more accessible to non-profits, community leaders, and changemakers across the province. Programs such as Inspire helped organizations build practical capabilities in innovation, collaboration, and systems change.
Strengthening Alberta’s Innovation Ecosystem
The Lab helped create stronger connections between government, community organizations, businesses, philanthropists, and citizens, contributing to a more collaborative and resilient social innovation ecosystem.
Creating Space for Experimentation
The Lab provided organizations with a safe environment to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and explore new solutions before making significant investments in implementation.
Building Long-Term Organizational Capability
Beyond individual projects, the Lab helped shift how organizations approach problem solving, engagement, and innovation by introducing new mindsets, tools, and ways of working that continue to influence leaders and organizations today.
The Social Impact Lab represents what becomes possible when community expertise and design expertise come together around a shared purpose.
For more than six years, J5 and United Way have worked side-by-side to create a platform that empowers communities to move from responding to social challenges toward designing better futures.
The Lab demonstrated that innovation is not just about technology, funding, or new programs. It is about creating the conditions for people to come together, understand challenges differently, and build solutions collaboratively.
What started as an ambitious experiment in Calgary has evolved into a province-wide movement that continues to strengthen the capacity of organizations and communities to create meaningful and lasting social change.