How Not To Do Rapid Response
Lessons from Launching a Product During A Pandemic
In Spring of 2020, we built NoRent.org to help tenants inform their landlord of their inability to pay rent due to COVID-19. It sends a certified letter on the tenant’s behalf, citing state-level legal protections, and connects tenants to national and local #CancelRent campaigns, as well as organizing and legal resources. While the tool started as a local project in Los Angeles, we made a decision to extend it across the US, and through a “rapid response” effort, rushed to get a national tool built within about three weeks. At the time, we had only operated on a local basis in NYC and with a community partner in Los Angeles with deep local roots. NoRent.org was our first attempt at developing a project with a national scope.
We wanted to take a moment to reflect on the choices that were made during the development process, acknowledge the tool’s misalignment with the strategy of some local partners, and share reflections on how we can continue to improve on our work moving forward. While there were certain things that went really well with our NoRent tool, we see particular value in sharing out our mistakes and learnings, in hopes that other organizations practicing co-design can learn from them too.
The Need
Now a national tool, NoRent.org actually started as a local project in Los Angeles, California, with our community partner Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE). SAJE advocates and organizes for tenant rights, healthy housing, and equitable development. They had identified a clear need for the tool, and we built it alongside them relying on their expertise. With the project concentrated on Los Angeles, its intended purpose was to help tenants enforce their rights under local legislation, and connect them with the direct support and organizing efforts offered at SAJE and within their community.
NoRent LA launched in early April of 2020, just when the COVID-19 crisis began to intensify across the Northeast. With the launch, we started to receive requests from other groups around the country asking whether a NoRent in their city was possible, and we even had some of our local users ask, “Where is the NYC version?”
By mid-April, our launch of NoRent LA morphed into a plan to recreate the tool in other cities where a potential partner had interest, which then became a plan to make the tool available in every state in the country. The growing severity of the crisis, inbound requests from tenant advocates, and complex map of eviction moratoria fueled this escalation. The scope was significant for our nine-person team — build a national letter-builder tool, vetted and in coordination with local legal advisors and organizing partners across the country, which we felt needed to be ready before next month’s rent was due: May 1st.
The Process
Impact on our Partnerships
In the push to make the tool available for tenants before May 1st, we worked too fast. In doing so, we didn’t consider how our tool aligned with the tenant movement’s goals in our hometown.
Organizers in different cities had different strategies for addressing the COVID-19 rent crisis, and there was no one-size-fits-all solution. For some of our New York City partners, NoRent.org ended up being antithetical to their own efforts on the ground. While our LA partners wanted a tool to help tenants follow local legislation to protect themselves, the strategy of our NYC partners was different. They didn’t want to follow laws that they considered poorly written; they wanted to cancel rent. Some of our key local partners were focusing their efforts on building power collectively in targeted rent strikes. Within their strategy, it was also crucial that tenants didn’t act individually. There was a misalignment: the goals of the movement in NYC and the goals of the national tool did not match.
Our normal design and development process involves multiple rounds of user interviews, testing, and iterating, in order to make sure our products are directly informed by tenant users. However, with public health measures moving us all away from in-person interactions, our ability to involve tenants in many rounds of design and feedback was limited.
The long term relationship and trust building that have led JustFix to become a successful, movement-integrated organization was being put to the test in a moment of urgency and physical distancing.
No Time to Communicate
As a staff, we missed a key strategic moment: when the idea to build a national NoRent tool came up, instead of asking “Are we doing something?” we jumped straight into “We are doing something. What is it going to be?” Charging ahead with the project, the only way we could get stuff done was through siloing our work and responsibilities. We had limited time for group discussions or reflections — our energy was focused on accomplishing the tasks at hand. Our approach did not allow us to listen to each other at a time when we really needed to.
In retrospect, our instinct to prioritize efficiency over thoughtfulness and communication here was a symptom of our team culture at large. Upon further reflection, we realized that the way we approached problems as an organization, with urgency and perfectionism, had roots in White Supremacy and stemmed from long histories of Eurocentric ideals influencing how we work under capitalism. Unfortunately, during our rapid response, we didn’t have the time to examine that, but we have since taken a step back to evaluate this. More on this later.
How We Realigned With the Movement
Following direct feedback from our NYC partners, we reconfigured the tool to prevent New York residents from sending a letter and instead directed them to organizing campaigns led by the Right to Counsel Coalition and Housing Justice for All. We did receive positive feedback from our partners in other states, so we kept the tool live in areas where it could still make a positive impact. The tool sent over 4,000 letters in the first three months.
Given this realignment, the NoRent tool evolved into a tool with intention and clear purpose for those who can make use of it — hence why NoRent.org is still in active development today and accessible to tenants in specific states. Over the last year, we’ve introduced new features in coordination with our local partners, like legal compliance with new California State laws regarding evictions, and the ability for tenants to send a new NoRent letter each month.
Lessons Learned
We see value in acknowledging our mistakes and have learned a lot from this process. Here are our guiding principles moving forward.
Move at the speed of trust and understanding rather than at the speed of light
We’re committed to being open to changing plans and to slowing down in order to develop a shared understanding of what and how we’ll be working together with our partners. We’ve started to model this in our work with our Design Advisory Council. At the end of July, we gathered a group of tenant organizers and tenant leaders to work with us to improve our products. We had a whole plan and timeline and heard feedback from participants telling us needs that we didn’t anticipate. This caused our timeline to slow down. Some people might say we’re behind schedule, but we like to think we’re exactly where we need to be.
Build the relationship before building the product
We learned that we can’t paint broad strokes on national work. We can’t rely on one solution to work universally across the US. Rather, we need to go deep locally. This means creating partnerships with organizations who work directly with tenants to ensure that tenants themselves are leading our design process. It also means getting a better understanding of the local political context and being clear about the goals of the local tenant movement. We’ll ask questions to understand and align with the governance structures and theories of change of prospective partners. We also want to bring our team together with partners at the beginning of the co-design process.
Interrogate white supremacy culture within our team dynamic
As mentioned, we recognize that so many of the things that came up in the making of NoRent.org are symptoms of a white supremacy culture and we are dedicating regular time to address this as a team. Perfectionism, rapid efficiency, and a manufactured sense of urgency are not virtues. We’re grateful to SURJ’s “White Supremacy Culture” for helping us realize this, and are consulting resources like Move to End Violence’s Racial Equity Learning Series to shift this. Going forward, we’ll continue to critically examine our team dynamic and the histories and identities we all bring into our shared space, in an effort to undo systems of oppression that influence our work dynamic.
More than anything, we are grateful to our partners for being so honest and open with us in providing feedback. It was precisely through the lessons they gifted us that we were able to adapt. Luckily, the tool landed at a place where we can all feel confident about its purpose and celebrate what was successful about its launch. And while the development process and its aftermath were tumultuous, it’s pushed us to apply these many lessons to our larger team dynamic in ways that will make us stronger collaborators going forward.
Written by Ilana Novick, Tahnee Pantig, and Sam Rabiyah in coordination with all JustFix.nyc staff.
