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COA's Meals and More
Live Well Collaborative and the Council on Aging of Southwestern Ohio (COA):
Design, Design Research, Program Operations
Initiative/Objective
The Council on Aging (COA) provides more than a million meals yearly for older adults across Southwest Ohio through their Home Delivered and Congregate Meal Program (HDM). The existing program was under threat due to the growing number of older adults, their varied nutritional needs, rising inflation, and increased competition in the meal-delivery industry that is more accessible and easy to use. The challenge was to modernize and diversify the current home-delivered and congregate meal model to better cater to older adults. So COA partnered with the Live Well Collaborative, a unique multidisciplinary team composed of faculty and students from the University of Cincinnati’s top-ranking colleges that offers cutting-edge design expertise to industry partners.
The Live Well team began by collecting information on other competitors in the home-delivered meal service to benchmark their service offerings. From there, the team completed a total of 27 interviews to gain functional literacy on how the HDM program works. These interviews included COA staff members, service providers, and older adults who spoke to their needs and desires for a better HDM program.
After completing the interviews, the team compiled the information from all stakeholders and began mapping out the HDM program’s service diagram. This helped the LWC team and COA staff members understand their current system and identify opportunity areas to improve their HDM service. The team then compiled a competitive audit of current home-delivered meal services to identify opportunity spaces and improve COA’s current HDM program.
After gaining functional literacy on the HDM program and its competitors, the team began ideating different concepts and strategies to enhance system processes. The Live Well team created a program called "COA’s Meals & More" that expands and personalizes service packages for older adults and empowers them to regain control over their lives by catering to their physical and mental wellness.
Overall, the 16-week project yielded insights and presented a broad range of strategic intervention opportunities far beyond meal delivery. Insights included packaging suggestions using the ADA and inclusive design guidelines, a new service diagram that optimizes the meal selection process, and an action plan for a summit at which local chefs, volunteers, businesses, universities, suppliers, farms, and meal providers can connect and workshop different aspects of the program. The summit will also serve as an opportunity to foster relationships with partners that could potentially provide materials and services for the program at a reduced rate, decreasing costs and dependency on federal funding for COA. An additional intervention recognized the issue of loneliness among older adults and suggested a meal companion program that matches volunteers with older adults to socialize and have meals together.
The development of the COA’s Meals & More program is an excellent example of an effective Design Thinking approach applied to a complex multi-stakeholder Service Design challenge.
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