Lesson: Design & Prototyping with Devika Patel & Natalie Griffen

Step #4 Source Outreach: How to reach out to the sources you need

Entrepreneurs or startups who are interested in using design thinking should definitely reach out to organizations like Design for America. They're created to help students and student entrepreneurs to pursue their social impact ideas, and by reaching out to them simply by just either talking to somebody who's within the organization, by sending them an email, subscribing to their email list, checking out their website, they're very responsive.

That's how I reached out to Design for America in the first place. I sent an email through their contact message on their website and I was contacted back within a week. That's how I became involved in Design for America.

We tend to gravitate towards the CDC, just because ours is more health related. The National Institute of Mental Health has a lot of great information. Autism Speaks, Autism Society, a lot of autism advocacy groups have how to videos and videos about autism in general that they give out to the world. We also actually looked at a lot of documentaries about autism, and we learned a lot from that as well.

Temple Grandin who is a huge autism advocate has a movie about her and we all watched that to learn about how Temple Grandin dealt with autism. We look at TED Talks. TED Talks have also been really important in looking at the autism experience and actually it was Temple Grandin's TED Talk that inspired me to pursue this project.