City of New York: Growing Up NYC

Helping NYC families find free programming

The big question

How can we make free NYC programs — that are scattered across dozens of agencies — more known by and accessible to the families they’re meant to serve?

What we did

The Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity set out to make city services easier to reach. Together, we designed and built Growing Up NYC: a mobile-first, multilingual platform that gathers free programs and events for children of all ages into one accessible home for parents and caregivers.

How we did it

• Talk to real New Yorkers. We visited city libraries and put prototypes of an agile, civic service design process in front of NYC residents, and gave the people who’d ideally use the tools a chance to shape their construction.
• Build for how people actually live. Our research showed that most residents would reach these services on their phones, so we designed mobile-first from day one.
• Design for a whole city. All the assets were coded in 10 languages so that the tools could serve all of New York’s 1.6-million-strong immigrant community.
• Make it last. The platform is easy to maintain and is the first NYC city site hosted in the cloud, making efficient use of limited staff time and budget.

The result

New York now has one accessible, award-winning digital home — where parents and caregivers can find free city programming for kids of every age — that’s stable and inclusive so that it can grow right alongside the city it’s serving.