Year Up is a truly phenomenal Bay Area nonprofit working to provide urban young adults with skills, experience and support that will empower them going forward in their lives. IDEO.org Fellow Cris Valerio describes her first week as part of the team tackling our newest Innovation Fund project.

During our first week on the Year Up project, our IDEO.org team (Joerg Student and me, Cris Valerio) have been schooled (heavily) by students, staff and board members (basically everyone we’ve spoken with at Year Up) on the finer details of “looking professional,” aka, wearing a suit, a skill I seem to have forgotten in the last few months away from Wall Street…and Joerg (whose been an IDEO designer for the last eight years) seems to, quite frankly, have never had.

In all seriousness, Year Up students are amazing examples of what happens when you invest in people while simultaneously demanding an incredible amount of accountability.

87% of their graduates are employed or attending school full time within four months of graduating from the program. Before you brush that off, consider this: one in two college graduates in 2012 are unemployed. This 87% stat is even more astonishing when you realize that some Year Up students are homeless.

Our IDEO.org design challenge on this Innovation Fund deep dive – help Year Up scale their model.

At first, this design challenge was, well, challenging, mostly because Year Up is already doing so many things right. As Year Up looks to scale, however, maintaining excellence is key. And this will be really hard as the organization grows. Especially when the core of what they do is so deeply personal.

During our first week of Hear research on the project, we spent time talking with C-level execs and upper management at various partner companies: Responsys, LinkedIn, and Salesforce to name a few. We also met up with Year Up students to hear their stories. And we biked through the streets of San Francisco... in suits.

This week, as we dive into synthesis, it’s our job to figure out what everything we’ve been learning all means. We have many, many questions. Deciding where to focus and what we can deliver over the next week is our task.

In the meantime, Joerg’s ONE suit is at the dry cleaners and I'm busting out my bubble gum pink suit tomorrow. Thankfully (or not) eight years in broadcast news left me with a ridiculous number of suits in god-awful colors...

Cheers!