Different domains. Different scales.
Same approach.

We were given an intersection: Exercise as Medicine, group medical visits, mental health. The challenge was to weave them into a single program for one of the hardest populations to engage. People with severe depression and anxiety are, by the nature of the condition, the ones who don't show up - not because they don't want to, but because showing up is part of what the illness takes from them.

We conceived, designed, implemented, and evaluated end-to-end a novel care model pairing psychiatry and a fitness trainer to deliver psychiatric care and exercise-as-medicine in a community setting. We designed the behavioural-change approach from literature and best practices, and translated research into a workable program with measurable outcomes.

The setting was a gym, not a clinic. Activities were often chosen by the participants. The group was designed as community - because isolation is the disease and the group was the medicine, deliberately. The psychiatrist and the personal trainer worked in the same room, treating one whole person.

A second iteration, Jump Step, was funded by a major Canadian foundation and run with peer researchers from the original cohort as co-designers. Participants of the first program became guides for the next. We were subsequently commissioned by the YMCA to author a health technology assessment strategy for scaling Jump Step provincially across their branches.

It was not the exercise. It was not the psychiatry. It was not the peer support. It was the synthesis - designed from inside what severe depression actually feels like, outward into a world that made showing up feel like becoming.

We were charged with bringing Exercise-is-Medicine to a province. From a napkin concept.

What existed when we arrived: a vision and a small team. No partner network. No applied research pipeline. No operating architecture. The proposition was real. The thing to build it through did not yet exist.

The work was to design and build that thing - viable structures, programs, and partnerships into a coherent, unified, single vital system. What every potential partner was carrying was different. The work was to design a structure where each partner got something they couldn't get alone, and where their separate motivations aligned into a single moving system.

What it became: over three hundred partners across health authorities, volunteers, academic institutions, community organizations, government, and the private sector. 12+ concurrent applied research projects. A 100+-page provincial strategy authored under our direction as the framework for the work.

The architecture worked because it was synthesized from inside the lived experiences of those involved, and built outward into a structure that respected and served what they were carrying.

In early 2020, as the pandemic was emerging, a global health analytics company had a platform that wasn't gaining traction in market. We were brought in to identify the path forward.

The reframe came in two calls. The platform's existing health-data-analytics capacity could be integrated with a front-facing mobile layer and become a digital contact-tracing tool - meeting a national need that was about to become acute. The opportunity: a proposed $10M+ national digital-health initiative to address COVID-19 across Canada and beyond.

Within five weeks, working as part of a small consortium under acute time pressure, we developed the strategic framework, shaped partnership and alliance structures across governments, NGOs, and private-sector actors, produced executive-ready briefing materials, drove stakeholder outreach from scratch, and coordinated external teams to ship a prototype.

We identified, cold-called, pitched, and secured engagement at the highest levels of Canadian government: Senators. Federal Ministers. Health Canada. Ontario Health. The Deputy PMO. The Minister of Digital Government. The Privy Council. The CMIO of BC Health. The Director General of Global Affairs Canada - while simultaneously positioning a small, unknown consortium credibly against the Google and Apple contact-tracing framework.

A former tech executive came to us with a story they had been carrying for years. The work eventually became two graphic novels, and then a pilot adaptation of the series for television.

The work involved entering each project from inside what it was trying to be. For the books, that meant working alongside the creator on voice, structure, character, and the rhythm of the page across two volumes - where the work was true to itself, and where it was drifting. Which scenes were earning their weight, and which weren't. How the second volume needed to relate to the first, as continuation, as deepening, as turn.

For the pilot, it meant translating the books into a new form. Page becomes screen. Book becomes series. Structural moves that work in print don't always work on screen. Voice that lives in the panels has to be carried by performance and shot design. The work was to keep what made the work theirs intact while letting the form change to match what the new medium asked for.

The two graphic novels are published. The pilot is in development.