Social Design Consultant
Designing spaces, programs, and experiences to strengthen human connections.
Our Disruptive Strategy
At Discover Outdoors Consulting, we are social designers, change-makers, and disruptors building social infrastructure to strengthen human connections. We challenge and encourage stakeholders and community members to think differently about where we live, work, and play.​​
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We focus on: ​Economic development. Civic engagement. Revitalization of places.​
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Our process is simple: discover, design, test, repeat or pivot.
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Why "outdoors?"​
Because the best connections happen outside the doors of our homes, workplaces, and comfort zones.
What We Do
We work at the intersection of economic and community development to create spaces, programs, and experiences to strengthen human connections.
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Public input sessions
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Ideation
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Research and presentations
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Placemaking consultation
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Experiential design and execution
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Events
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Design and lead outdoor/nature experiences
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Design + Strategy + Built Environment + Outdoors + People​​
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What Is Social Infrastructure?
Think of all the components of community building that bring people together in concentrated ways, for the long term: aesthetically pleasing parks, trails that encourage pedestrian travel, way-finding signs, online event calendars, and economic drivers such as cafes, bookstores, record stores, and yoga studios.
Building social infrastructure requires cross-sector collaboration and ongoing intentional design and attention. Hiring a social design consultant can save time and resources by gathering public input, driving a vision forward, and ensuring activity from all parties is cohesive, strategy-aligned, and resource-efficient.
Meet Jenny
Jenny Sheets founded Discover Outdoors in 2023 with the primary goal to get people outside, together. That vision has expanded into designing social infrastructure for communities large and small.
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After a 16-year stint away, Jenny moved back to her hometown of Fargo, North Dakota during the pandemic. Despite the welcoming community, and many ways to engage, she found herself lonely and longing for meaningful connections. Using herself as a case study, she studied why people gather and isolate, how people find a community they trust, and where people choose to linger. ​
Jenny has a long history of studying communities and how people move in and out of spaces, both physical and digital. She has a BA in Philosophy and English, a Masters in Public Administration, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She has run nonprofit programming, fundraised, designed and led events, managed marketing campaigns, studied user experience and user interface, built a number of companies, and taught college writing. But she still holds that her many years serving in restaurants taught her almost everything she needs to know about human behavior.
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She currently lives in Moorhead, Minnesota with her husband, three-year-old son, and wild golden doodle puppy. She prefers to be outside.