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Message Strategic and Tactical Collaboration Resource Area For Teaching (RAFT) is a non-profit organization in San Jose, California that delivers ‘classroom magic’ by providing teachers with ideas for creative experiments and hands-on activities and the donated materials to build them—from cardboard tubes to rubber washers to film canisters. The materials come from hundreds of local businesses, diverting more than 10,000 cubic feet of reusable items away from city landfills monthly. Sharing a belief in the value of hands-on education, IDEO and RAFT collaborated on several strategic and tactical projects, including a visioning session and a transformation workshop, in addition to ongoing brainstorming and prototyping sessions for turning donated materials into classroom activities aligned to the California State teaching standards. As RAFT celebrated its tenth anniversary, it set a goal to double its educator membership by the year 2010 by expanding its retail facility and aligning staff with a unified vision. IDEO co-led the visioning session for RAFT’s executive staff members and advisory committee. The session resulted in a plan to create a ‘magical kingdom for educators’ that could serve as a hub of community involvement and an energizing source of teachable ideas. IDEO also led a transformation workshop with the objective of helping RAFT redesign their warehouse retail space. The outcome was an examination of flow and layout of space, and the communication systems needed to convey RAFT’s oeuvre of teaching ideas. Applying the principles of IDEO’s design-based approach, RAFT streamlined checkout procedures to meet the varying needs of weekday and weekend traffic, while creating informational displays highlighting the versatility of the available materials. RAFT and IDEO’s partnership continues to grow with regular brainstorms and “protostorms” to transform donated surplus materials into constructivist learning experiments and introduce K-12 students to the value of collaboration. http://www.ideo.com/work/strategic-and-tactical-collaboration/