Teachers and faculty from McDonogh School took it upon themselves to form a Wellness Committee to create a holistic K-12 wellness program for the school. Greatest Possible Good facilitated a meeting with design thinking exercises to help the committee envision its own success and discern what immediate steps it could take to test their ideas and make progress.

In this meeting, McDonogh’s Wellness Committee split into three teams of four to come up with ideas on how to set up the committee for success. Success means enabling holistic, sustainable wellness for the McDonogh community. The committee recognized through their prior research that fostering wellness demands a wide range of changes and improvements to curriculum, culture, and on-campus resources. With so many responsibilities ahead of it, we wanted to focus on how the committee could structure itself to achieve its goals.

Each team took time to craft their “How might we” statement, a sort of North Star for their ideation. They then brainstormed solutions, refined them, and thought about underlying assumptions. Each team came up with ways to prototype their solutions, ie. how to quickly test those underlying assumptions. Every participant offered ways they personally could help the other teams.