The Challenge
People living with with autism or intellectual or developmental disabilities often need support to complete basic tasks such as self-care, home maintenance, and transportation. However, due to funding and personnel shortages, thousands do not receive services, and disability organizations struggle to attract and retain qualified staff. For more than 100 years, KenCrest has supported disabled individuals via residential and community engagement services, early intervention, enabling technology, and education. Faced with overwhelming need that they struggled to meet, KenCrest asked – could new technology – an app out of the Silicon Valley – give people with autism or intellectual disability disorder radical new independence to complete tasks without caregiver assistance?
The Experiment
In 2018, Barra awarded KenCrest a $50,000 Catalyst Fund grant to deploy a mobile app called AVAIL mHealth as a new way to support people with autism and intellectual disability disorder to achieve independence. The app used video-based directions to help individuals complete tasks – like washing a dish or getting dressed – on their own, rather than with the help of aides or caregivers.
KenCrest CEO Marian Baldini explained the potential transformative power of the tool:
“One of the people that we piloted with was an individual who had trouble remembering to go to the bathroom. We set [the app] up so that it would remind her, and […] it worked like a charm. It gave her personal dignity […] but the part that we didn’t expect was the social consequence with her family. When the family learned that she had achieved this level of independence, they started spending more time with her […] they were comfortable picking her up and going places together because she did not need a staff member that the family didn’t know to accompany her.”
However, despite these promising early results, once KenCrest committed to partnering with the startup company that developed the app, they began to run into problems. The app was glitchy, and significantly less user-friendly than they initially understood. And as business ramped up for the startup, its owner struggled to manage the company’s growth. A year later the company failed, leaving the app unsupported and forcing KenCrest to discontinue their program.
Learning from Failure
On its face, this story appears to be one of a failed experiment – a promising technology that did not deliver. Barra is no stranger to failure. As a funder of novel ideas, our support is meant as early-in risk capital that allows people and organizations to try out new ideas, with the full knowledge that many experiments may shift or fail. For Barra, we are not just interested in whether an idea succeeds or not – but also what organizations and their peers can learn from trying out new ways to solve the pressing problems they face. Other funders of innovation similarly focus on learning over outcomes and the importance of sharing both positive and negative results with the field.
KenCrest’s experience, though difficult, led to profound learning about how to apply new technologies to support disabled communities. In a world focused on care and compliance, KenCrest was interested in outcomes – did the technology actually make individuals’ lives better, richer? They found that the pace of change in technology as well as the speed by which many tech startups take early-stage products to market could easily misalign with the attention to detail needed to make sure that a solution actually works for disabled individuals. And too often, companies that designed products for seniors tried to adapt them for disabled people without adequate attention to the differences in these communities’ needs. When this happened, disabled individuals could inadvertently become test cases for under-developed products, subjecting them to difficult and frustrating experiences that did not work for them.
Turning Insights into Impact
In the wake of this experience, KenCrest was determined to share their insights with others. They are embarking on creating a national professional association for groups trying to apply technology in work with disabled communities. As Baldini put it, “the aim of the Enabling Technology National Network will be to share knowledge about effective strategies for working with technology and tech companies, as well as lessons learned with particular systems.”
Barra’s grant launched KenCrest on a journey to figure out what technology tools are actually right for their communities and how they can help other organizations doing similar work to avoid challenges and find the right partners. They hope that the association will bring together organizations working with seniors and those serving individuals with physical disabilities, autism, and intellectual disability disorder, for intersectional learning and exchange.
Baldini believes that this shift to the systems level could change the game:
“Sometimes when we plan as individuals instead of as a system, we miss opportunities to see things.”
In our grantmaking, this kind of field-level impact is Barra’s north star – and in KenCrest’s case, a failed experience produced an idea with potential to shift an entire field toward deeper impact.