SERVICE DESIGN | DESIGN RESEARCH

Keep Austin Fed

Helping a nonprofit help its communities.

March-April 2025

Partnered with Keep Austin Fed through to identify operational friction points and propose scalable, human-centered service interventions. Conducted field research, stakeholder interviews, and journey mapping; co-created over 20 service concepts and prototyped them as a physical card deck and presentation materials. This project was conducted as part of the course Civic Service Design, taught by Jon Freach at The University of Texas at Austin.

Keep Austin Fed (KAF) is a local nonprofit that rescues surplus food from businesses and redistributes it to communities in need. While their mission is simple, the systems that make it run (food donor coordination, volunteer scheduling, giveaway logistics) are anything but.

We were brought in to help identify pain points across their operations, from food rescue pickups to large community giveaways. This was part of our Civic Service Design course, and while we weren’t there to “fix everything,” our goal was to leave them with clear, useful prototypes they could adopt immediately or scale later.

Our Approach

We began by diving into research on food rescue operations, food insecurity, nonprofit workflows, and language equity. We observed food pickups and community giveaways in person, watching how volunteers moved through the space and where breakdowns tended to happen.

We facilitated journey mapping sessions with staff to trace the full process from food pickup to distribution. One of the most insightful moments came from an exercise where we asked team members to imagine waving a magic wand, and talking about what changed. It opened the door to ideas that were aspirational, but also deeply grounded in their day-to-day pain points.

We heard about confusion between donors and volunteers, last-minute logistical changes that didn’t reach the right people, and how hard it was for volunteers to feel confident rejecting spoiled donations. Much of staff time was being spent on preventable issues that stemmed from gaps in communication, clarity, or shared expectations.

How might we help Keep Austin Fed serve its communities more effectively, without overextending its limited time, space, and staff?

Lisa Barden, Executive Director of Keep Austin Fed, participates in a journey mapping exercise.
Photo by Jon Freach.

Design Solution

To respond to these challenges, we co-created a library of more than 20 service concepts and organized them using a prioritization matrix. Each concept was mapped by level of effort and potential impact, making it easy for Keep Austin Fed to decide what to try first. These concepts lived in conjunction with a service blueprint of reimagined workflows for food rescue and community giveaway operations.

Some ideas addressed direct miscommunications, like a one-pager for donors outlining what kinds of food were acceptable to donate, or a bilingual signage system for community giveaways. Others supported internal workflows, like a WhatsApp broadcast tool for last-minute changes, or a welcome kit that helped new volunteers feel prepared and empowered on day one.

To make these concepts as usable as possible, we designed a printed card deck and a corresponding digital version. These could be used to guide internal discussions, onboard new team members, or pitch ideas to funders or collaborators.

Staff members recognized themselves in the concepts. That was the biggest compliment. Even though implementation wasn’t expected, the proposals gave Keep Austin Fed a new language to describe operational friction and made it easier to advocate for change internally. Many of the ideas were things the team had imagined at one point or another but hadn’t had time or space to pursue.

What this project reinforced for me is that service design doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel. Sometimes it just means noticing what’s already working, listening carefully to what isn’t, and offering up a few well-framed tools to help a team move forward.