Olga Elizarova

Nationality: Russia
Organization Name: Play Collaborate Change
Impact Region: Northern America
About the Social Business: Play Collaborate Change uses design thinking and behavioral science to generate and promote social innovation that can help address economic, social and environmental challenges. It organizes social innovation challenges, social innovation camps and custom projects to help organizations co-design solutions that target the root causes of recurring problems together with people directly affected by these problems.
About the Y&Y Fellow: Olga Elizarova is a dentist, public health professional, behavior change designer and entrepreneur with more than 12 years of combined healthcare and behavioral & social sciences experience. Originally from Russia, she started her path in the healthcare working in a private dental clinic starting in her 3rd year of dental school. Closer to her graduation, she realized that she loves health field, but that she wanted to be able to have a bigger positive impact. This lead her to join the Federal Ministry of Healthcare and Social Development in Moscow, Russia. Her primary focus at the Ministry was developing, from its origin, a national multi-year program for adjusting environment and designing and implementing products for people with disabilities. The insights learned from these pilot projects were used to help implement the learnings across 85 cities. This experience really highlighted many gaps in my knowledge of how health systems work. This was also the first time that she unknowingly had experience co-designing with end-users; and she saw the tremendous value of bringing people affected by the problem into the design process early on. From here, public health from here felt like a natural transition as an opportunity to learn how to design and implement large scale interventions and learn how to apply behavioral science in practice. In 2014, she was fortunate to get an opportunity to learn by doing while still continuing my Masters in Public Health in the USA. During her 6 years at the human-centered design agency Mad*Pow, she further developed her expertise in applied behavioral science, design thinking, and received vast experience working with teams on designing and implementing solutions for health and finance. In 2016, she got engaged into the conversation about sustainability. First through reading some books, including the book by Professor Muhammad Yunus, and later by attending EAT summit in 2017. Her growing interest in SDGs and social business movement, as well passion for entrepreneurship led her to co-teach a Corporate Responsibility course at MassArt in Boston, MA. The course has a focus on sustainable practices in product and service design; students examine the triad of sustainable labor and community; sustainable environmental practices; and sustainable profits. Currently, she is based at the Ministry of Possibilities in the UAE, training the teams of public sector employees in design, behavioral science and experiment design processes, and in parallel work on the launch of my own business idea.

Olga Elizarova

Nationality: Russia
Organization Name: Play Collaborate Change
Impact Region: Northern America
About the Social Business: Play Collaborate Change uses design thinking and behavioral science to generate and promote social innovation that can help address economic, social and environmental challenges. It organizes social innovation challenges, social innovation camps and custom projects to help organizations co-design solutions that target the root causes of recurring problems together with people directly affected by these problems.
About the Y&Y Fellow: Olga Elizarova is a dentist, public health professional, behavior change designer and entrepreneur with more than 12 years of combined healthcare and behavioral & social sciences experience. Originally from Russia, she started her path in the healthcare working in a private dental clinic starting in her 3rd year of dental school. Closer to her graduation, she realized that she loves health field, but that she wanted to be able to have a bigger positive impact. This lead her to join the Federal Ministry of Healthcare and Social Development in Moscow, Russia. Her primary focus at the Ministry was developing, from its origin, a national multi-year program for adjusting environment and designing and implementing products for people with disabilities. The insights learned from these pilot projects were used to help implement the learnings across 85 cities. This experience really highlighted many gaps in my knowledge of how health systems work. This was also the first time that she unknowingly had experience co-designing with end-users; and she saw the tremendous value of bringing people affected by the problem into the design process early on. From here, public health from here felt like a natural transition as an opportunity to learn how to design and implement large scale interventions and learn how to apply behavioral science in practice. In 2014, she was fortunate to get an opportunity to learn by doing while still continuing my Masters in Public Health in the USA. During her 6 years at the human-centered design agency Mad*Pow, she further developed her expertise in applied behavioral science, design thinking, and received vast experience working with teams on designing and implementing solutions for health and finance. In 2016, she got engaged into the conversation about sustainability. First through reading some books, including the book by Professor Muhammad Yunus, and later by attending EAT summit in 2017. Her growing interest in SDGs and social business movement, as well passion for entrepreneurship led her to co-teach a Corporate Responsibility course at MassArt in Boston, MA. The course has a focus on sustainable practices in product and service design; students examine the triad of sustainable labor and community; sustainable environmental practices; and sustainable profits. Currently, she is based at the Ministry of Possibilities in the UAE, training the teams of public sector employees in design, behavioral science and experiment design processes, and in parallel work on the launch of my own business idea.
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