From Clipboard to Community: How BAYADA Turned State Goals Into a Game Worth Playing

Play can sneak up on you. One minute you're designing what looks like a fun community inclusion activity, and the next, your clients are dancing hula in costume, collecting business cards from local shops, and checking off state-mandated goals without anyone having to ask twice. That's essentially what happened when Tatyanna Nabarro, a Habilitation Manager at BAYADA Home Health Care in Hilo, Hawaii, decided to try something different for the people she supports.

It turned out that the best way to get people to meet their goals was to have fun!

When the Routine Is the Problem

BAYADA Home Health Care provides services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or ID/IDD. The clients Tatyanna works with every day span a wide range of abilities and needs, and for many of them, daily life follows a predictable arc: familiar settings, familiar routines, familiar faces.

That's not a failure of care. It's actually a sign of how deeply BAYADA's staff invest in their clients' comfort and stability. But state-created plans, called Individual Service Plans (ISPs), outline goals that push beyond comfort: learning social cues, exploring the community, building job readiness, and taking on small responsibilities like recycling. These aren't checkbox exercises. They're genuinely meaningful stepping stones toward a more integrated, independent life.

The challenge was that delivering on those goals could feel, well, a little like work. For the clients and, honestly, for the staff too. BAYADA had tried bringing their community together by partnering with organizations like Goodwill and Easter Seals, creating spaces for mingling. Those gatherings had their value. But there was nothing that pushed people to genuinely explore, to try something new, to get a little competitive.

"Nothing like this," Tatyanna said, comparing the old approach to what came next.

"This was more of an exploration, hands-on. And just something different. Where it didn't seem like a job for them."

A Scavenger Hunt That Was Already in Her Back Pocket

Tatyanna didn't find the platform through a Google search. She found it somewhere a little more surprising: a softball tournament.

She'd experienced Goosechase firsthand through the ASANA softball community and knew how energizing a well-designed game could be. She'd seen it make people move and think and push themselves in ways that a passive gathering simply couldn't.

So when she started thinking about how to breathe new life into BAYADA's community inclusion work, the connection clicked. "I just thought Goosechase would be a great way to do that," she explained. "We had a lot of fun doing it at ASANA, so I figured, why not give it a try here?"

Hula Dancers, Hidden Xylophones, and Business Cards

Tatyanna launched a multi-week Experience for BAYADA staff and their clients in Hilo, Hawaii. Because most clients don't have smartphones, the setup was simple and smart: staff members, called Hab Techs, downloaded the app and formed teams built around their assigned clients. A team named after a client's initials, with all the workers who support that person, became one competitive unit. It was a natural extension of the relationships already in place.

What made the Mission design clever was that the line between "fun challenge" and "ISP goal" was almost invisible. Collecting five local business cards sounds like a scavenger hunt item. It's also a real-world social skills exercise and, for clients with job discovery as an ISP goal, a chance to walk into a potential workplace and introduce themselves. Finding flowers and taking photos sounds like a casual afternoon activity. It's also community exploration, another ISP staple. When the Experience is right, the outcomes take care of themselves.

Then there were the ones that were just pure fun. One asked participants to record themselves making music. Tatyanna had quietly tucked in a bonus: play the xylophone. BAYADA has one in the office, but it's easy to miss. "Nobody really knows about it," she said. "So it really made them think of, like, where can I find a xylophone?" Some teams went home and found their own. She hadn't expected that.

The standout, though, was the Merrie Monarch Mission. The Merrie Monarch Festival is a prestigious hula competition held annually in Hilo, drawing performers and audiences from around the world. Tatyanna built a Mission around it, inviting participants to dance hula, with bonus points for having an audience. The result: staff members dressed up and performed hula in the office. On camera. Joyfully.

(For other organizations thinking about how to design Missions that surface this kind of joy, our piece on interactive engagement ideas for nonprofits gets at the underlying design principle.)

And then there was recycling. It sounds mundane, but that's exactly the point. Recycling is an actual ISP goal for many of BAYADA's clients with IDD, a small but real marker of community integration and personal responsibility. Dropping it into the Experience didn't dilute the fun. It just meant that while people were laughing and competing, they were also quietly knocking out state goals.

Nobody Wanted It to End

Tatyanna had assumed the Experience would run its full multi-week course at a leisurely pace. She was wrong, in the best possible way.

Four teams completed every single Mission four days before the Experience even closed.

"I didn't have to remind them, like, hey, you know, Goosechase is still going on. You got a week left," she said. "No, they were, in it. And they actually wish it was longer. They're like, are you going to add more Missions?"

What struck her most wasn't the leaderboard hustle, though. It was what the experience revealed about her clients. People who are sometimes assumed to lack the drive or capacity to push themselves showed up with a level of focus she hadn't seen before.

"I think their creativity. Their creativity for sure, and their determination was surprising," she said. "I don't think I've ever, in my time with BAYADA, seen them so determined to do something and to finish it all the way through."

These are people who are often underestimated. The Goosechase Experience gave them a chance to show resourcefulness, humor, artistic flair, and genuine competitive fire.

The staff who participated are now spreading the word. People who missed the first Experience are asking for the next one. Tatyanna is already thinking about expanding to other islands and running a friendly inter-island competition. The pattern of a successful first Experience inspiring a bigger one in year two is exactly the compounding nonprofit teams should design for from the start.

And the photos and videos from the Experience? She's bringing them to upcoming ISP meetings with state representatives. The people who review her clients' progress on paper rarely get to see who those clients actually are. She plans to change that.

"A lot of them don't really see the clients," she said. "They don't get that personal relationship like I do. So it'd be cool to see their reaction."

Play as a Window

There's a version of community inclusion that looks like attending an event. And then there's a version that looks like dancing hula in your office because someone built a Mission that made it irresistible. BAYADA found the second version, and the people in their care are better for it.

The thing about a well-designed Experience is that it doesn't feel like a means to an end. It just feels like fun. But for Tatyanna's clients, every business card collected was a social skills rep. Every recycling Mission was a responsibility goal met. Every hula performance was a moment of self-expression that no quarterly report could have predicted or captured. The clipboards will always have their place. But sometimes the most direct path to a goal is the one that doesn't look like a path at all.

What is Goosechase?

At Goosechase, experience is everything. Originally inspired by scavenger hunts, Goosechase is an online platform that enables organizations and schools to engage, activate, and educate their communities through delightful interactive experiences. Sign up and try creating a free recreational Experience, or check out our Pricing!