Humanature Humanature

Design for Humanity

Design for Humanity

We are a management consulting firm that works with leaders and their organizations to put humans at the center.

What We're About

Our mission is both simple and complex: we support organizations, leaders, and initiatives to center humanity in the context of their work. We specialize in applying the science of human development and flourishing to the work of change management and organizational well-being.

Right now, many are forced to center funders, outputs, outcomes, procedures and bureaucracy…but not the humans impacted by the systems and issues complicating their ability to survive, let alone thrive. 

We imagine a world that supports the whole of humanity and all that it takes to hold up humanity. Our org helps develop and shape some of the processes and tools that will transition us there. We believe in systems of transition that help us practice, iterate, and implement the equity, health, and belongingness the world so desperately needs. 

Our solutions draw from tried-and-true methods in the Indigenous world along with groundbreaking research in fields like social and cognitive neuroscience, trauma theory, human ecology, organizational behavior, social epidemiology, and the science of learning. We have built a budding practice that supports teams in designing organizational cultures, learning opportunities, and models of practice that foster a culture of learning and compassionate curiosity. 

We believe that equity is a process as much as it’s an outcome. So, power-sharing, developing sustainable relationships with diverse communities and stakeholders, and cultivating a sense of shared humanity are all imperative activities for systems of transition. 

At humanature, we believe that all of this knowledge is paramount to how we, as a world, think about human development, belongingness, and the future of society. 

Recent Work

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Humanature's Empathy Lab

We led an unprecedented six-month-long professional learning community in Philadelphia that’s driven meaningful change around DEI, REI, and strategic human design in the workplace. Our curriculum offered stakeholder participants, including some of the region’s leading nonprofit and for-profit employers, a chance to collaborate on the future of work in ways that benefit the entire employment ecosystem.

Permit Capital Advisors

We currently consult with PCA to provide a social due diligence process for a local impact investing fund with a strong commitment to gender and racial equity. We offer strategic advice to the fund and to entrepreneurs seeking financial support and provide an analysis on the alignment of the potential investment’s budgets, operations, and mission in the context of their desired impact.

Triple Bottom Brewery

We spent three years consulting ownership on how to design a company culture that could live up to the B Corp’s social-justice mission as a fair chance business. Triple Bottom Brewery is now thriving with a tight-knit group of employees that include historically excluded populations impacted by failed housing and criminal justice policies. Currently, its workforce is 50 percent people of color and 50 percent women.

United Negro College Fund

We led a strategic desgin-team for a national workforce development effort of 60+ private sector partners. The team created a framework to improve programmatic design, practice, and evaluation for organizations and funders targeting often excluded populations, such as people earning low wages with an associate’s degree or less and opportunity youth.

Our Clients

Our clients hail from a diverse array of sectors and backgrounds. Although our work is ever-growing, many of our clients share an interest in deepening their understanding of: 

  • How to build cohesive communities and workplaces
  • How to create equitable models for internal and external stakeholder accountability and power-sharing 
  • How to implement participatory problem-solving models 
  • How to improve intraorganizational sense-making 
  • How to frame and structure problems, and thereby derive solutions, in the context of human development and the imperative to survive and thrive

If these ideas align with your values and objectives, we are here to help you, as an individual or as an organization, build a more just world.

About

We have to get this right

We help you create the conditions for core human attributes to flourish.

The result is a smarter organization or initiative with systems that support stakeholder performance, skill-building, and more intentional  short and long-term thinking. This happens at the nexus of generating more supportive, resilient, and creative environments that honors the diverse and complex nature of the humans present in the work.

humanature Methodology

At humanature, our work is grounded in a methodology that we call “Design for Humanity”.

Design for humanity is the intersection of three core concepts:

 

  1. Human Resilience
  2. Economic Resilience 
  3. Ecological Resilience

 

We draw from the ever-expanding scientific literature around the human brain and body, the social nature of our species, human well-being, and the design and growth of systems. We implement those lessons in the real world through the creation of dialogue, learning spaces, and collaborative design spaces that take into account the mechanics of our humanity and the historical and contemporary barriers to access and equity.

By adopting a far-reaching and inclusive view of humanity, we support leaders and organizations in pursuit of an equitable future. We offer frameworks and tools to foster long-term alignment between missions and outcomes, so that organizations do more than just “signal” their values. Our clients actually get results. Our work is heavily informed by the science of learning, identity-based experiences, and the impacts of stress and trauma. 

  • Cognitive Science
  • Biology
  • Human Development
  • Adult Learning

Our Allies

These are our closest partners in the work who help us effectively create impact and share learnings from our journey.
 

Services

1

Discovery

We utilize a holistic diagnostic process to first help organizations interrogate their current policies and practices, and how they relate to human development, meaningful interaction, and performance. From there we offer steps, including professional learning opportunities, to increase capacity and enable cultural change.

Problem and Solutions Framing

Humanature collaborates with clients to establish a baseline understanding of the potential challenges and opportunities, often invisible to an organization, that can hamper or reinforce the humanity and achievements of their team(s). This scaffolding is used to co-design and imagine solutions that meet the diverse needs of the organization's stakeholders.

The Mechanics of Our Humanity

We supply and customize our expert curriculum that guides clients through stages of learning and sense-making that push forward their understanding of topics such as the science of learning, performance and skill development, and narrative intelligence. Ultimately, we help people understand the multidimensional nature of our humanity and its deployment, or lack of consideration, in team, project, and work-based settings.

2

Strategy & Design

We work with clients to create “Humanity R&D Labs” as a fast-paced learning and design space that serves as a platform for staff and other key stakeholders to collaboratively explore, strategize, and innovate on what it means for them to center shared humanity in the organization’s culture, processes, and practices. The labs include:

Reimagining Places (Design-Focused Activities)

We interrogate various person-in-environment contexts such as belongingness (maximizing healthy opportunities for individuals), asset framing (honoring the strengths of each person), and the science of learning (upskilling and reskilling)—plus, how these concepts relate to identity-based experiences.

Building A Common Lexicon and Knowledge Base (Experiential Learning)

We work with teams to help them develop a common grounding in the four co-occurring domains of human development, using health sciences, indigenous wisdom, and systems-based models. We explore how interwoven our humanity is with 21st century concerns of productivity, creativity, skill development, expectation management, and envisioning the future.

Content/Tool Development

To keep the work going, we supply organizations with a content library that enriches, explores, and reinforces these human-centered approaches beyond the setting of a formalized engagement.

3

Building

We offer long-term consultations and coaching opportunities to ensure continued progress and accountability on mission-aligned goals for organizational change, equitable management, and cultural impact. These opportunities might also include activities listed in the “Discovery” and “Strategy & Design” sections.

Equitable Futures

Amidst a rapidly changing technological and social landscape, it’s important for organizations to establish, further, and measure their journey towards equitable operations and outcomes. We support your organization in developing, finding, and implementing frameworks that are adaptable and iterative in support of that journey.

Multi-Stakeholder Learning Labs

Empathy Lab being one example, we convene like-minded stakeholders to host conversations and experiential learning opportunities around human development, sharing solutions, novel projects and ideas on an ecosystem or regional level.

Participatory Power Sharing

We work with clients to map out and test methods of power-sharing and participatory problem-solving into the operations of their organization, an initiative, or project.

Our Resources

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Contact us today to begin unlocking your team's full human potential.

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