Building on innovation beyond a Lab
A retrospective on five years of building and learning by The Caregiving Lab.
After five years of research, experimentation, and creative exploration, The Caregiving Lab at Noora Health is closing its doors. As we step into a catalytic role of shaping how the world thinks about and invests in caregiving, the Lab’s work, methods, and spirit of curiosity are being woven into the fabric of the entire organization. This piece shares what the Lab built, lessons that emerged, and how we’re moving ahead.
Why innovation labs matter
In any nonprofit working across geographies, contexts, and focus areas, the pace of program delivery rarely leaves room for the bigger questions: Are we solving the right problems, or just the most visible ones? What does the landscape of our work look like five years from now? And what are we learning? Innovation labs in social impact organizations exist to hold that space — and we’ve written more about why here.
It was with this spirit that The Caregiving Lab — formerly known as Noora Labs — was established in 2021.
Positioned as an insider with an outsider’s perspective, the Lab was designed to understand caregiving more deeply, more honestly, and more humanely.
In practice, this meant three things:
- Holding space for exploration and experimentation: The Lab carved out time for ideas outside the scope of current programs, for research that questioned existing models, and for experiments that might not yield immediate results — running alongside other teams without disrupting their workflows.
- Guiding organizational direction: A well-functioning lab does not merely reflect the organization’s current priorities — it helps shape the ones that come next. The Lab intentionally worked at the edges of Noora Health’s core programming, watching for early signals in health systems, emerging technology, and caregiver experiences, and helping teams respond with intention rather than reaction.
- Building institutional memory: Every conversation with caregivers, every experiment, added nuance to Noora Health’s understanding of caregiving. The Lab also explored creative ways of documenting that knowledge — going beyond case studies and fact sheets to use mediums that provoked thought and helped people relate to caregiving both metaphorically and literally.
Taken together, these weren’t just ways of working, they were what set the Lab apart: the time to go deep without pressure for quick answers, a genuine invitation to collaboration across teams, and findings communicated through creative and immersive mediums designed to move people, not just inform them.
From curiosity to creation — a glimpse into the Lab's way of working over the years.
What the Lab learned
The Lab pursued a wide range of projects, each broadening our collective understanding of caregiving.
- Communities aren’t blank states, and health programs shouldn’t treat them that way: One of our earliest projects, Not a Blank Slate, uncovered myths, traditions, and deeply held beliefs around health information that families carry long before they encounter a health program. The learning: respectful, effective behavior change doesn’t ask people to abandon their traditions, but to look for safer alternatives within them.
- Frontline health workers need more than training platforms; they need to feel seen: Building on an evaluation of a training and education platform for nurses, the Lab asked a larger question: What actually motivates nurses? A deep dive into their professional lives, pressures, and aspirations yielded insights that helped shape how Noora Health designs its platform for nurses — moving beyond information transfer towards what actually keeps them engaged.
- Caregiving is an emotional, diverse, and deeply personal experience: Caregiving Conversations began as an immersive audio-visual experience connecting caregiving emotions with color, music, and drawing on real caregiving stories from teammates. It grew into an open invitation for people to contribute their own definitions of care — building a living library of what caregiving actually means to the people inside and around Noora Health.
- Better care experiences come from understanding the system from within: In collaboration with the Sundaram Medical Foundation, the Lab examined how a hospital’s ethos and day-to-day functioning shapes the experiences of caregivers and patients moving through it. Through extensive on-the-ground research, the Lab mapped out a service blueprint, producing a set of recommended changes designed to improve the care experience while supporting the hospital’s own growth and efficiency.
- The invisible load caregivers carry is as important as the clinical journey: Through extensive primary research in both rural and urban contexts, the Lab mapped the full arc of a caregiver’s experience — the rhythms of their day, the complexities of a treatment journey, and the invisible weights that become a barrier to care. Outputs included a reimagined representation of a caregiver’s load through the visual of wilting blooms, a short story collection, and a care toolkit designed to support program teams working with vulnerable caregivers.
- Scaling into new contexts requires understanding cultural dynamics, beyond just systems: When Noora Health expanded into Indonesia and Nepal, the Lab turned its attention to community nuance and the family side of caregiving — pursuing insights from within homes and communities while program teams worked on institutional frameworks.
- Thoughtful interventions don’t add to the load, they mold themselves around what already exists: In rural Andhra Pradesh, India, the Lab collaborated directly with program teams to develop and test a patient and peer support intervention for persons with diabetes and hypertension. Grounded in primary research with patients and co-created with community health workers, the result was a series of short, experiential learning activities designed to slot into existing workflows — adding value due to its highly engaging, relatable and interactive nature without adding burden.
- Understanding where the caregiving ecosystem is headed is the first step to influencing it: The Web of Care mapped the emerging discourse around caregiving, tracing its intersections with gender, mental health, the care economy, and climate change. The project gave Noora Health a clearer foundation for developing positions on emerging trends in the caregiving universe.
- Caregiving is personal, and that’s what makes it powerful: For Noora Health’s 10th anniversary, the Lab designed an interactive digital quiz to help teammates and partners discover their caregiver archetype — crafting a personalized entry point into a conversation that can otherwise feel abstract. The result was a caregiving mosaic: a collective portrait of the many different ways people give care.
The people who powered The Caregiving Lab – thank you!
Reflecting back, looking forward
The Lab’s distinctive contribution wasn’t any single project, but a way of working. In-depth design and community-led research, reading between the lines and listening for what wasn’t being said, outcomes crafted not just to inform, but to move people — through visual art, storytelling, audio, and design. And an open-door ethos: ideas that other teams didn’t have bandwidth to explore always found a home here, and findings were offered as directions to pursue, never mandates to follow.
Closing a dedicated lab like this might sound like a step back from innovation. We think it’s the opposite.
The Lab was always in service of something bigger — a way of protecting the time and space to ask harder questions during a period when Noora Health needed to establish what those questions even were. It worked. Five years of research, experimentation, and creative outcomes have left behind not just toolkits, stories, and landscape maps, but something more important: a culture of curiosity.
That culture is an asset. Innovation concentrated in one team is powerful; innovation embedded across every team is transformative. When the people designing programs, building partnerships, and entering new geographies all carry the Lab’s instinct — to question, to experiment, to look for what’s being missed — the organization doesn’t just grow. It grows wisely.
The Lab’s legacy is more than what it produced. It’s the curiosity it sparked, the boundaries it pushed, and the foundations it laid for others to build on.
The Caregiving Lab was shaped by many hands over the years. It was the brainchild of Jaqueline Cooksey, and later evolved under the leadership of Manju Catherine Pothen. Our deepest thanks to Minha Khan, Anjali Moorthy, Srinidhi Iyer, Anagha Bansod, Yeshaswini Parimi, Harleen Kaur, Kaitlyn Paulsen, Deepak Ramarao, Manmeet Singh, and the stellar current team — Charley Vincent, Simran Toor, and Vrinda Manocha — for their relentless curiosity and care.
The Caregiving Lab
Noora Health
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