Safe to Fail Experiments
For the last four years, Healthier Jupiter has been providing Mini-Grants to improve the health of our Jupiter community. The goal of the Mini-Grant program is to engage the greater Jupiter community in creating innovative approaches to healthy eating, active living and mental health. We work with local not-for-profits, civic organizations, churches, schools, government organizations, houses of worship and community leaders. Over the years, Healthier Jupiter’s Mini-Grant Program has evolved to meet the community's needs and has been modeled off of NHS Improvement’s Safe to Fail Experiments.
What is a Safe to Fail Experiment?
Safe to Fail Experiments are small scale experiments that approach an issue from a variety of angles. This allows emerging possibilities to become observable. The emphasis is not on ensuring success or avoiding failure but rather focusing on trying something new and building your knowledge. It is okay for ideas to fail in a manageable way you are able to learn from. For ideas that have observable benefits, you can brainstorm how to enhance and amplify those ideas.
Why Do Safe to Fail Experiments Matter to Healthier Jupiter?
Healthier Jupiter promotes and ensures opportunities for healthy eating and active living for all in our community to prevent, treat and manage chronic conditions. Our community is diverse and there are a myriad of factors influencing residents’ health and wellbeing. For example, we know that if you exercise and eat well you will reduce your risk for several chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, etc. However, getting someone to change their eating habits or exercise regularly is heavily influenced by the environment, stress level, family responsibilities, workload, pre-existing conditions, and culture, among other things.
There are a lot of moving parts (see Social Determinants of Health). We are trying to improve health in a very complex system. Moving these communities toward better health requires a new way of thinking about cause and effect. Therefore we need experimentation!
Over the last four years, Healthier Jupiter’s Mini-Grant applicants and awardees have been probing the system, creatively problem solving and testing different ideas around health and wellness. With a $2,500 grant we support organizations testing small innovative community projects. Mini-Grant awardees, whether they realize it or not, have joined a portfolio of local tests to promote health and well-being for our Jupiter community.
Some of the projects that were awarded a Mini-Grant were tested and produced observable benefits that were adopted and amplified. For example…
In 2016 - 2017 Els for Autism used their Healthier Jupiter funds for Ernie Els #GameOn Autism Fitness Project to create a permanent, autism-friendly park in North Jupiter Flatwoods. Additions to the park included break areas, improved fencing, signage and the modification of current informational literature. They were able to leverage this project to receive additional funding for more park amenities. Now the North Jupiter Flatwoods received formal designation as a certified autism-friendly natural area, certified by the Center for Autism and Related Disorders, making it the first public owned land in the state of Florida to receive this distinction.
El Sol, Jupiter’s Neighborhood Resource Center’s
In 2016 - 2017 El Sol used the funds from the Healthier Jupiter Mini-Grant for the Jupiter Cookbook Project where they developed a healthy cookbook containing traditional family recipes collected from community members. El Sol staff and volunteers were able to collect over 100 healthy recipes from about 40 community members. This project brought the community together to share traditional recipes with a health twist. It also serves as an earned income project for El Sol, selling over 100 books alone in the first year. The recipes are now used for demonstration at the El Sol Farmers Market and in house cooking classes.
Critical to these innovative projects is learning along the way and contributing new knowledge to understand failure and work toward success. Learning is a very valuable outcome in Safe to Fail Experiments. For example...
Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies
In 2017-2018 Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies used their Healthier Jupiter Mini-Grant for their Small Steps Great Parents Educational Workshop Series to host nutrition workshops at El Sol, Jupiter’s Neighborhood Resource Center. Workshop participants had the opportunity to hands on participate in cooking along with sampling healthy recipes. Including participants in the cooking and sampling allowed for the residents to be well educated in making healthier lifestyle changes and eliminate fear of trying new food options. The biggest challenge was to gain the trust and participation of the community. In the beginning of the cooking series they established the workshop time without consulting the community. They quickly learned due to low participation that the workshop time was not feasible for the community. They quickly modified the workshop time after receiving community feedback which turned out to be successful.
In 2018-2019 Southpaw Prince used their Healthier Jupiter Mini-Grant for their Free After School Boxing Program. All thirty students attended their boxing program religiously over the six months of the program. Students experienced an increase in flexibility, boxing ability, and strength. Southpaw Prince’s staff found that transportation was an issue for some students who wanted to attend practice. On the other hand, they also found that some students were late to practice due to a lack of responsibility stemming from the parents. The children can want to participate in an after-school activity as much as the next kid that participates in every sport under the sun, but children will soon be disappointed if parents do not create an encouraging environment to assist them. Southpaw Prince’s director suggests, as a community, we have to solve the root causes of a problem rather than the symptoms.
We appreciate these organizations for sharing their challenges and how they learned from it to adjust and amplify their work. By allowing organizations to apply for our Mini-Grant Program and stay in our Mini-Grant Network, this builds support for new initiatives that contribute to health in a variety of meaningful ways. By testing these experiments simultaneously we are nudging our complex system into a new place that will continue to improve health over time.
How Do I Plan for a Safe to Fail Experiment?
Take the Safe to Fail Experiment model and utilize it for planning for your Healthier Jupiter Mini-Grant Project. Here are some criteria for selecting YOUR Safe to Fail Experiment:
Any experiment must be something you can do something about and that you believe stands a chance of having a positive effect. Ask yourself...What change is the community asking for? What do I/we think needs changing? What can I/we actually change?
It has to be a change with an observable or measurable effect so that you can see if the change was good or bad. You cannot and should not predict what will happen. Ask yourself..Where and how can I monitor impact without prescribing outcome goals?
Be creative and flexible in problem solving and decision making.
In planning your Safe to Fail Experiment you must do both:
Identify what you will do if positive observable benefits result from your test. How will you amplify your results?
Identify what you will do if there are no observable benefits or negative observable results. Remember, failure is okay. What is your recovery strategy? What did you learn?
Your Mini-Grant Project needs to be practical and actionable, specific guidelines should also be worked out and specified - such as the time-frame and budgetary limitations that the “experiment” should work within. Ultimately, your actions should be focused on learning and storing knowledge and experience for future application. We are all working together to nudge the system into a better healthier place.
Below is a useful tool to utilize in planning your Safe to Fail Experiment.
For more information about Healthier Jupiter’s Mini-Grant Program please visit www.healthierjupiter.org/grants. If you have any questions or want to talk through planning for a Safe to Fail Experiment please call Healthier Jupiter’s Project Director, Joanna Peluso, at 561-234-0182 or email questions to healthierjupiter@htpbc.org.