When completing the steps of the design-thinking approach, the first step is to empathize with your stakeholders. Our team decided the best way to do this, besides talking with each other, was to hear from peers and alumni. We sent out two different surveys, one for alumni and one for current undergraduate students. For the alumni survey, we asked questions such as “If you could re-imagine your experience at ODU, what aspects of your time attending ODU would you change?” and “What do you wish you had known prior to attending ODU that would have helped you be a more successful student?” While for the current ODU students, we asked them similar questions such as “What do you feel is one aspect of ODU that you wish you could change?, "How would you foresee that change being made?” and “How do you feel ODU could have done better in terms of preparing you for college?” We decided to get the opinions of alumni because we figured if there are similarities between what the alumni said and how the current students feel, that is the area in which we should focus on most. By asking these questions our team was able to find a common theme between the responses between the alumni and current students. After we received numerous responses from both surveys and met with our faculty mentor, we decided as a team to address the barrier between minoritized students and mental health resources and education.

Once we got started looking at the survey responses and narrowing down our “how might we..” the ideas for change starting exploding. There were so many different solutions we had and all of them seemed to have something to do with one another so our prototype is a mixture of a lot of different ideas. Some of the ideas we came up with in the beginning were fixing the student announcements to be more informative and less like spam, making advising meetings mandatory for all students, providing mental health awareness, etc. While we were brainstorming and looking at the big picture, we realized that we wanted our prototype to be specific to helping the African American and Latinx student population. That is when we found out about Safe Space through our faculty advisor. Space Space is a training program for faculty and staff to learn how to be allies for the LGBTQ+ community that has been around for a few years now. We decided to learn more about this training program and that we were going to create one of our own surrounded around cultural competency and mental health awareness. It is extremely important that people realize there is a huge difference in the way cultures are raised from one another. Our goal in creating this training program is to educate and bring awareness to the lack of accessibility of mental health resources for African American and Latinx communities.