THE YNTB STORY
It’s been a journey.
THE CHALLENGE & IDEA
The concept for YNTB came out of Shift Lab 2.0, a social innovation lab in Edmonton, Alberta looking to create and test interventions to dismantle racism in our city. As part of one of the Core Lab Teams in Shift Lab 2.0, our challenge question was “How might we create encouraging pathways that help potential allies for racial justice overcome white fragility?”.
Knowing what we knew and having a sense of what we wanted to do with an intervention, we came up with a bunch of different ideas. One of those ideas was the “white fragility box” subscription service. We tested early prototypes of this approach and it appeared that there was something about the experience of anti-racism work being handled in this personal way. Since our time in the lab we have continued to develop the subscription service and it has evolved to the current four box series.
THE ACCIDENTAL LAUNCH
On June 7th 2020, just as we were about to launch a small marketing campaign to test the desirability of the subscription service, our website was accidentally shared in a tweet by the Shift Lab. Within 48 hours we had over 1000 subscribers!
Since the accidental tweet in June 2020, we have shipped over 2700 boxes across the country and have worked with subscribers to develop and test the 4 boxes that comprise the YNTB experience.
We are so grateful for the support we received from the Edmonton Community Foundation and the Stollery Charitable Foundation to help make this possible.
AN EVER EVOLVING EXPERIMENT
YNTB is all about experimentation and prototyping! We started off with a simple shoe box covered in brown paper and used the process of building, experimenting, testing, and implementing to create the four box series…and we are not done!
Our design approach:
Conversation & Ideation (building) - we have a rich and meaningful team conversation about what we think will be meaningful and then we generate possible ideas for activities.
Experimentation & Development (experimenting) - we select the ideas we think could be of value and are of interest we build early version to share with the team. We give feedback and make refinements to the potential activities.
Sharing & Feedback (testing) - once we have taken our experiments to a place when we need more input, we create a small batch of boxes to send to randomly selected subscribers for testing. We survey and interview our testers, take their feedback into consideration, and make adjustments as needed.
Delivery & Review (implementing) - we take the now tested and improved version of the box and apply the full YNTB design treatment and make it available to our subscribers. We are always reviewing and identifying if updates and changes need to be made to the boxes as well as considering new products and services.
FROM SCRAPPY PROJECT TO SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
The last two years have taught us that: a) there is a desire for an anti-racism subscription series that speaks to the realities of racism in Canada, and b) we need a solid organizational infrastructure to support us to developing a sustainable path forward.
In June 2021 we developed our social enterprise, called Unpack Impact Inc. This allows us to generate revenue through a variety of opportunities and reinvest all profits back into the social mission of You Need This Box. We could have created any organization and we believe as a social enterprise we have the best opportunity to create a lasting legacy of social change based on knowledge sharing and an understanding of anti-racism in Canada.
