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SiG@Waterloo Innovators in Action Speaker Series 2010

The SiG@Waterloo "Innovators in Action" Speaker Series, will apply the ideas of social innovation to a number of specific sectors and issues - education, youth mentorship, inclusion, collaboration and cultural change. Each of the keynote speakers will share their experiences of operating at the national level to identify and address the root causes of intractable social challenges. Each keynote lecture will be followed by a local panel discussion who will share their reflections on the presentation and offer insight into their own experiences.

May 5 - Ric Young at The Museum, Kitchener, ON

May 19 - Cindy Blackstock at The Museum, Kitchener, ON

June 2 - Penny Milton at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo, ON

June 16 - Ilse Treurnicht at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo, ON

June 23 - Bruce MacDonald at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo, ON

All lectures are FREE to attend. RSVP required.
Spaces are limited. Register to attend below!

Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: The Museum, 10 King Street West, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Ric Young - Architect of numerous campaigns for change and one of Canada's leading authorities in the field of social innovation.

Eric (Ric) Young was a pioneer in the field of social marketing. He cut his teeth on the early stages of the PARTICIPaction campaign, and was co-founder of Canada’s first dedicated social marketing agency. He left that company in the mid-90s to start E.Y.E. | The Social Projects Studio™ – a company dedicated to the creation and development of breakthrough social change initiatives. Working with leading government, corporate and not-for-profit clients, he became increasingly frustrated by the inadequacy of the tools, models and methods society has at hand for tackling our most complex problems. This led him, in the year 2000, to propose to DuPont Canada that they embark on an initiative “to foster new mindsets, new skill sets, and a new culture for social innovation in Canada”. He worked with DuPont over several years to develop the Social Innovation Initiative, eventually forging a partnership with McGill University to create one of the world’s first social innovation think tanks. This think tank gave rise to the best-selling book, Getting To Maybe. He is on the faculty of the Boston College Centre for Corporate Citizenship. His current voluntary roles include: membership on the board of Ecotrust Canada, the Canadian advisory board of Right To Play and the editorial board of the Social Marketing Quarterly. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of the Arts, a member of Massey College’s Quadrangle Society, and a fellow of SiG (Social Innovation Generation) at the University of Waterloo.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: The Museum, 10 King Street West, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Cindy Blackstock - Executive Director of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.

A member of the Gitksan Nation, she has worked in the field of child and family services for over 20 years. Key interests include exploring the over representation of Aboriginal children in child welfare care, structural drivers of child maltreatment in First Nations communities, human rights and the role of the voluntary sector in expanding the range of culturally and community based responses to child maltreatment.

Current professional interests include serving as an Atkinson Economic Justice Fellow, J.W. McConnell Family Foundation Social Innovation Generation Fellow, co-director of the Centre of Excellence for Child Welfare and a board member of the National Aboriginal Youth Organization.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, 25 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Penny Milton - CEO of Canadian Education Association.

Penny Milton has been Chief Executive Officer of Canadian Education Association since 1996. She was past Chair of the Toronto Board of Education, Executive Director of the Ontario Public School Board Association, and served as Deputy Minister of the Ontario Premier’s Council of Health, Well-being and Social Justice. She has held several public appointments including current membership on The Minister’s Curriculum Council and Governance Review Committee for Ontario. She was a founding Director of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation and now serves as a Director of ArtsSmarts and Goodwill Industries. She is the author of several book chapters, numerous articles and presentations on policy issues in education.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, 25 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Ilse Treurnicht - CEO of MaRS Discovery District.

Ilse Treurnicht is the CEO of MaRS Discovery District, a leading innovation centre located in Toronto. She oversees both the development and operations of the MaRS Centre and its broad suite of entrepreneurship and innovation programs.

MaRS offers advisory services, market intelligence and entrepreneurship education to emerging companies in health care/life sciences, digital media/ICT, cleantech and social purpose businesses across Ontario. Ilse has worked closely with the leadership of Toronto's academic institutions and teaching hospitals to create MaRS Innovation, an integrated commercialization platform for 14 Toronto Institutions and served as the interim Managing Director for a year following its formal launch in early 2008.

Ilse joined MaRS in early 2005 from her role as President & CEO of Primaxis Technology Ventures, a start-up stage venture capital fund focused on the advanced technologies sector. Prior to Primaxis, Ilse was an entrepreneur with senior management roles in a number of emerging technology companies.

She is an active member of Canada's innovation community, and has served on the boards of private companies, industry associations and research organizations, and has been a member of several government advisory panels.

Ilse holds a DPhil in chemistry from Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes scholar.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, 25 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Bruce MacDonald - President and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada.

In 1995, Bruce joined the staff of Big Brothers and Sisters of Canada as Director of Marketing and Special Events. Three job titles and two organization names later, Bruce eventually moved into the senior staff position, becoming President and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada in March 2004. Prior to BBBSC, Bruce was involved with the Hamilton-Burlington YMCA, Stoney Creek YMCA, Ontario Senior Games and the Kinsmen and Kinette Clubs of Canada. Bruce holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Sports Administration from Laurentian University and a Masters in Management in the Voluntary Sector from McGill University.

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The 100 - Episode 2 on Social Entrepreneurship

Jennifer King (of Capacity Waterloo Region) and I, joined local community animators Hilary Abel and Brock Hart last Sunday, March 14 to record Episode 2 of The 100 podcast.

The 100 is a podcast on local events, politics, cafes, food, technology, arts, the music scene and a whole lot more, in and around the Region of Waterloo.

Jennifer and I were invited to discuss our views on social enterprise and social venture organizations.

Would love to get feedback and comments on our segment, especially when it comes to our perspective on social entrepreneurship and social innovation. Enjoy!

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Waterloo lecture presents ideas on social change for pressing social problems

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Waterloo lecture presents ideas on social change for pressing social problems

WATERLOO, Ont. (Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010) - An internationally acclaimed social innovator, once praised by South Africa's Nelson Mandela, will give a public lecture later this month and launch his latest book on how to effectively deal with pressing problems in society.

Adam Kahane, author of Power & Love: A Theory & Practice of Social Change, will deliver this year's Waterloo lecture on social innovation on Wednesday, Jan 27 at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo. The event, which begins at 7 p.m., is presented by Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo, Region of Waterloo, CIGI, Capacity Waterloo Region and Musagetes.

The annual lecture highlights world-class thinkers with new ideas on how to achieve significant, durable social change for increasingly complex social problems.

"Kahane will discuss power, our desire to achieve our own purposes, and love, our desire to heal the whole, as complementary drives that are both required to effect sustainable social innovation and change," said Frances Westley, a University of Waterloo professor who holds the J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation.

In the lecture, Kahane will draw on his extensive experience with designing and leading complex multi-stakeholder change processes to offer practical guidance for effectively balancing power and love, two usually polarized drives.

Kahane, a facilitator and partner with Reos Partners, is well-known for a distinct approach to scenario thinking and development, which played a key role in moving South Africa from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s. He is also an associate fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School.

His earlier book, Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities, earned high praise from Mandela. The former South African president called it: "A breakthrough book that addresses the central challenges of our time - finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created."

Tickets for the lecture cost $25, and include admission, a copy of Adam Kahane's latest book and a reception. For registration and more information on the lecture, visit www.sig.uwaterloo.ca.

About Social Innovation Generation, University of Waterloo

Social Innovation Generation is a collaborative partnership between the Montreal-based J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, University of Waterloo, MaRS Discovery District in Toronto and PLAN Institute in Vancouver designed to foster a culture of continuous social innovation in the country. The SiG project is focused specifically on social innovations that have durability, impact and scale. SIG focuses on profound change processes and encourages effective methods to address persistent complex social problems on a national scale. For more information, go to www.sig.uwaterloo.ca.

About University of Waterloo

In just half a century, the University of Waterloo, located at the heart of Canada's Technology Triangle, has become one of Canada's leading comprehensive universities with 28,000 full- and part-time students in undergraduate and graduate programs. Waterloo, as home to the world's largest post-secondary co-operative education program, embraces its connections to the world and encourages enterprising partnerships in learning, research and discovery. In the next decade, the university is committed to building a better future for Canada and the world by championing innovation and collaboration to create solutions relevant to the needs of today and tomorrow. For further details, visit www.uwaterloo.ca

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An Introduction to Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change

By Adam Kahane - via www.reospartners.com

Beyond War and Peace

Our two most common ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges are the extreme ones: aggressive war and submissive peace. Neither of these ways works. We can try, using our guns or money or votes, to push through what we want, regardless of what others want—but inevitably the others push back. Or we can try not to push anything on anyone—but that leaves our situation just as it is.

These extreme ways are extremely common, on all scales. One on one, we can be pushy or conflict averse. At work, we can be bossy or “go along to get along.” In our communities, we can set things up so that they are the way we want them to be, or we can abdicate. In national affairs, we can make deals to get our way, or we can let others have their way. In international relations—whether the challenge is climate change or trade rules or peace in the Middle East—we can try to impose our solutions on everyone else, or we can negotiate endlessly. These extreme, common ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges usually fail, leaving us stuck and in pain. There are many exceptions to these generalizations about the prevalence of these extreme ways, but the fact that these are exceptions proves the general rule. We need—and many people are working on developing—different, uncommon ways of addressing social challenges: ways beyond these degenerative forms of war and peace.

A character in Rent, Jonathan Larson’s Broadway musical about struggling artists and musicians in New York City, says, “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!” To address our toughest social challenges, we need a way that is neither war nor peace, but collective creation. How can we co-create new social realities?

Two fundamental drives

To co-create new social realities, we have to work with two distinct fundamental forces that are in tension: power and love. This assertion requires an explanation because the words power and love are defined by so many different people in so many different ways. In this book I use two unusual definitions of power and love suggested by theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich. His definitions are ontological: they deal with what and why power and love are, rather than what they enable or produce. I use these definitions because they ring true with my experience of what in practice is required to address tough challenges at all levels: individual, group, community, society.

Tillich defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity.” So power in this sense is the drive to achieve one’s purpose, to get one’s job done, to grow. He defines love as “the drive towards the unity of the separated.” So love in this sense is the drive to reconnect and make whole that which has become or appears fragmented. These two ways of looking at power and love, rather than the more common ideas of oppressive power and romantic love (represented on the cover by the grenade and the rose), are at the core of this book.

Read the full article here.

Adam Kahane will be speaking at the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

At the Waterloo Lecture, Adam Kahane will discuss power, our desire to achieve our own purposes, and love, our desire to heal the whole, as complementary drives that are both required to effect sustainable social innovation and change.

I have blogged about Adam Kahane in the past, after I read his first book, Solving Tough Problems, which I found to be quite insightful.

I am certainly looking forward to hearing him speak at the Wateroo Lecture on Social Innovation at CIGI next month.

You can register to attend the event here.

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Lessons from Engineers Without Borders

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I attended a lecture this past Monday evening where the keynote speaker was George Roter, co-founder of Engineers Without Borders Canada. This event was part of the Change Agent Series hosted by Capacity Waterloo Region, in partnership with a number of organizations including Social Innovation Generation.

I first met George Roter when we invited him to give the opening keynote at the inaugural Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship, held at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University in November 2007. Back then, we were simply a group of students and recent graduates from UW and WLU, looking to foster a dialogue around social entrepreneurship and social enterprise in the Waterloo Region. The WCSE eventually became the Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and for two years, we found moderate success mainly in the university student community, running a lecture series, a 3-day social enterprise 'bootcamp' intensive, as well as a follow-up conference on social enterprise in November 2008, with Marc Kielburger as the opening keynote speaker.

Alas, for a number of reasons (which I hope to eventually highlight in a future blog post), the Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship no longer exists. However, I have taken lessons from that failed start-up organization and will certainly carry them forward with me.

When George Roter spoke on Monday, he shared lessons learned from Engineers Without Borders through the years. Each one of them resonated with me, and I thought that I would share them here:

LESSON NO. 1: CHANGE IS MESSY

Since its founding in 2000, Engineers Without Borders has always had as its mission statement: "Promoting human development through access to technology"

George talked about fostering a culture of continuous learning within the organization, and in the years that EWB has been doing international development work overseas in Africa, they have begun to realize that perhaps the social change they are looking to affect is not as simple as "promoting human development through access to technology." George admitted that the process of social change is complex, and perhaps EWB's role in international development in Africa is to help create the institutional framework that allows innovation to occur. That is why at the EWB Conference back in January 2009, George stood before an audience of 750 fellow EWB members, and perhaps more dramatic than he intended, burned their mission statement on stage as a symbolic gesture of embracing change and uncertainty.

Change IS messy.

It was important to communicate these changes to EWB members across the board. However, for an organization that has grown as large as EWB has in the past 10 years (30+ EWB chapters across Canada, with close to 50,000 members), this task has certainly posed a challenge. George admitted that they underestimated how long it would take to get this message across their membership given the obvious challenges of geographical distance between chapters; and even more so to come up with a new mission statement for EWB. But that is ok, as you will see from the next lesson he shared.

LESSON NO. 2: THE FAILURE PARADOX - IMPORTANT TO LEARN FROM MISTAKES

George then spoke about being prepared to fail. "If you aim to be wildly successful, you need to be prepared to fail"

For any social venture to be successful, they need to be open to failure and uncertainty. This does not mean that you go out of your way to fail, you certainly need to have your i's dotted and t's crossed. Rather, you need to establish a culture of openness and risk-taking very early on in the organization, and this requires leadership from the top. In other words, it is OK to go out there and take risks. If the risk pays off, then well done, you continue to grow and manage your organization from there. If it does not, then you acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them, and see if you can achieve the desired result in a much more effective manner. Since EWB published its first annual report way back when, they have always included an ad-hoc "failure report section" where they highlight lessons learned from out in the field. Only recently have they begun to publish an actual "Learning from our mistakes" report, that is sent out to all their members and staff, as well as their donors and board of advisors.

George recommended reading the following book, Getting to Plan B, to get more perspective on this. So often in the social/voluntary sector, do we place a heavy emphasis on ourselves to plan for, and execute Plan A, without allowing ourselves to even consider a Plan B, C or D. Of course, this is not as simple as it sounds, as there are issues of non-profits and charities being tied to funders/government agencies averse to taking risks, and so forth. It seems that EWB has been lucky in this respect. Because they have always been regarded as "shit disturbers" (George's words, not mine), they are given the leeway by their donors and board of advisors to take on opportunities while managing risk, and thereby learning from the process. They are currently helping their partner organizations in Africa to adopt a similar mindset of managing risk, reporting and learning from their mistakes, but perhaps presenting it in a much more diplomatic fashion given the context of the culture in Africa.

I read a great blog post recently on what makes a good (social) entrepreneur that should be required reading for any startup founder, wannabe entrepreneur or leader within an established organization. What it comes down to in the end are four letters: JFDI (a play on Nike's Just Do It).

LESSON NO. 3: HUMBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

And lastly, the notion of humble entrepreneurship, is certainly an intriguing one. George talked about the opposing forces of humility and entrepreneurship, where more often than not, it takes a daring and charismatic leader (entrepreneur) to lead a team of people from the very beginning. As the organization grows, more emphasis should be placed on the organization and its mission, rather than on the entrepreneur. However, sometimes ego gets in the way and founders have a hard time time letting go of control, stifling innovation and debate in the process, and thereby risking the future of the organization.

This reminds me of a conversation that Rod Schwartz of ClearlySo and Liam Black of Wavelength, had a couple of months ago on the notion of the charismatic social entrepreneur. It is certainly worth revisiting:

"In the early stages of any entrepreneurial venture, social or otherwise, it is the energy and drive of the single entrepreneur (or sometimes a duo of co-preneurs, à la Google) that keep the “show on the road”. Her (or his) passion, drive, connections, persuasive powers etc. are what enable the venture to get through the impossibly difficult early days.

In social entrepreneurship this is even more the case. As there is often no equity upside, the financial incentive is essentially non-existent. Moreover, the social nature of the organisation gives the enterprise the element of a “crusade”. In this regard the CEO/Founder’s vision is the lifeblood of the enterprise—the source of strength on which others often draw.

Yet frequently this strength becomes a source of weakness instead, especially as the organisation matures. So impassioned is the leader by the mission, so violently consumed by this personal passion, they stifle innovation, debate, staff development and, inevitably, the enterprise’s future. Such dysfunctionality is often the rule, in the dozens of social enterprises I have observed over the past decade."

George mentioned that one of the challenges of operating in the social/voluntary sector, is that we do not force high performance. This is why it is important to invest time, money and energy into smart and passionate people, those who have a passion for what is possible, regardless of credentials. Creating value for what you ultimately want to achieve and see in this world is really what drives people in the end.

George then ended the evening by relaying the story of a farmer in Malawi named Justin Panja whom he met several years ago. Justin, with the help of EWB, has been able to grow 14 different types of crop on his farm in the village of Mulere to earn an income. He is a man with no formal education having only completed the 4th grade. Yet, Justin has the passion, drive and energy to work as hard as he can in order to realize his dream of sending his three children to university. Will this dream be realized? Nothing is for certain. However, Justin is held up as an example of a person who has the passion for what is possible, and will do what is necessary to accomplish his goals.

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Overall, I enjoyed the lecture and it certainly sparked a lot of thoughts for me (hence, this long blog post).

I spoke to George after the talk, and asked him the question of what was crucial to getting EWB off the ground in its infancy, relating my previous Laurel Centre experience. He said the one important factor that was absolutely critical to EWB's early success, was attracting and putting together a solid board of advisors who believed in what they were doing, and leveraging their intellectual capacity as well as their connections to key resources in the industry. Of course, having a great team from the start helped out as well.

It seems that both George and Parker Mitchell, had a support system of people who believed in them and their ideas right from the very beginning; allowing them to take risks, make mistakes and learn lessons along the way, and thus growing Engineers Without Borders Canada into the success that it is today.

For some insight into the EWB experience from a personal perspective, below is Jon Fishbein who gave a talk titled "Meet the Real Africa" at Ignite Waterloo recently.

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Ignite Social Innovation

I often come across the question "So, what do you do?" when I am at an event and meeting people for the first time, or catching up with old friends from high school or university.

More often than not, I find myself having to explain the work that I do from the very beginning. It usually begins with providing a basic overview of the terms social innovation and social entrepreneurship, both from the Social Innovation Generation perspective, complemented with the emerging definitions of the terms.

I have also heard the argument that there will come a point in time where the word 'social' will no longer be needed in front of the word 'entrepreneur' to define 'social entrepreneur', as the very definition of 'entrepreneur' in itself would have evolved to encompass the ideals and values of a social entrepreneur: an individual focused on social and environmental impact, while maintaining net positive financial returns as well. (Again, this is a very broad definition of social entrepreneurship)

Frances Westley and Nino Antadze also have an interesting perspective on social innovation, social enterprise & social entrepreneurship, in their monograph on social innovation, Making a Difference: Strategies for Scaling Social Innovations for Greater Impact, published by SiG@Waterloo back in March 2009, that helps to put all three terms into context.

Figure 4 explains on which scale the above-defined three concepts introduce innovation. Whereas social entrepreneurship focuses on an individual and social enterprise addresses organizations, social innovation strives to change the way a system operates. Consequently, social entrepreneurship and social enterprise operate within the larger framework of “wider trends of thought and practice” (Westall, 2007, p. 2). Therefore, Leadbeater (2007) suggests, the policy on social enterprise should be developed within the boundaries of a wider strategy on social innovation.

However, we still have a long way to go before the terms social innovation and social entrepreneurship, enters into mainstream vocabulary.

That being said, the following video is certainly a great primer if you are not too familiar with social innovation, or if the field of social change has recently piqued your interest.

Above is my colleague Lisa Torjman from SiG@MaRS, delivering a 5-minute talk on social innovation at Ignite Toronto a couple of months ago. This short video highlights what social innovators are interested in. From convergence and complexity theory, to social-ecological resilience and systems design, Lisa does a great job of condensing the complex elements surrounding social innovation, into the Ignite presentation format of only 20 presentation slides, with only 15 seconds allocated to each slide.

And on that note, make sure to mark your calendars for the first-ever Ignite Waterloo event, set to take place at the Waterloo Region Children's Museum on November 25, 2009.

If you enjoyed Lisa's presentation above, you will certainly enjoy the roster of exciting speakers and topics that we have lined up for Ignite Waterloo. The Ignite Waterloo presentation that I am personally looking forward to is Simon Clark's Hacking the 'hood - Simple ways to turn a neighborhood into a community.

Have you ever wanted to live in a really great neighborhood? One where everybody knows each other, where you can’t walk down the street without meeting fifteen people you know? You could move to such a place, but why not create it where you already live? Learn some simple tricks to turn your neighborhood into a community to cherish.

About Ignite Waterloo

Ignite Waterloo captures the best of Waterloo Region’s geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure?

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Opportunities to Create Social Change - Workshop Recap

Opportunities To Create Social Change

View more presentations from Renjie Butalid.

Understanding the process of transformative social change and how young people can become a part of the movement

I facilitated my first social innovation-related workshop on Thursday evening this past week and the response from the participants seemed positive.

To recap, I started out by playing the Playing for Change music video, Stand by Me, as people were filing into the workshop. I primarily used this to set the right tone for the evening, showcasing how this one particular song could unite musicians and inspire people around the world through music.

After introductions, I played the Yes We Can video from the Obama campaign, and as it played in the background, I talked about how Obama is easily the most visible transformational leader in recent times, and why many people, especially young people, were drawn to him and his inspirational message of hope in record numbers throughout his presidential campaign last year.

To further illustrate my point of young people being engaged in social issues more than ever, I also showed the Greenpeace "Angry Kid" video, going to the other extreme of young people being 'angry' at adults for not doing nearly enough to combat climate change.

I related it to what I know many young people are searching for in their lives right now:

The capacity to pursue their passions, and find meaning and fulfillment in the work that they are doing.

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I come across many examples of this everyday, including a number of friends who are currently overseas doing international development work right now after having recently graduated from university: Kristina Lugo in Malawi, Ruby Ku in Botswana, and Majid Mirza in Pakistan.

I also shared my own story of literally stumbling into the field of social change back in September 2007, and this happened when my friend Andrew Dilts asked me if I was interested in helping him run a conference on 'social entrepreneurship' at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. I said sure, not knowing what I was really getting myself into.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

In any case, the point that I was trying to make was that as soon as my interest was sparked in social entrepreneurship and social innovation, I did my homework and began to realize that there were many organizations and people out there involved in the process of transformational social change, adopting innovative solutions and sustainable business models to tackle complex and intractable social problems, in order to have a positive impact in peoples lives around the world.

People such as Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank and Bill Drayton of Ashoka have been engaged in this process of transformational social change for over thirty years now. And I know for many young people, including Dev Aujla of DreamNow, who spends his time between Toronto and New York City; Melissa Richer of the Ayllu Initiative currently living and working in Brazil; or Brooke Estin, who works for Kiva, ChangeFusion and All Day Buffet and is based in Thailand; they are involved in this process in a leadership capacity and I know that they are loving every minute of it.

What is inspiring to me is that there are certainly many more young people out there just like Kristina, Ruby, Majid, Dev, Melissa and Brooke who are passionate about having a positive impact in the world today.

But what is transformational social change?

In order to address this question, I felt that it was necessary to provide some context on the nature of problems: simple (similar to following a recipe), complicated (sending a rocket to the moon) or complex (raising a child); and why for intractable social problems such as poverty or homelessness for instance, that have many underlying factors that contribute towards them, the simple and conventional approach of allocating more funding towards homeless shelters and food banks, hoping that more of these will simply solve the problem in the long-run, does not seem to work.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that homeless shelters and food banks are essential and do provide a great service for those in need in the short run. However, if the goal is to really get at the root of the problem of homelessness and poverty, i.e. for a developed country like Canada, why are there even homeless shelters and food banks in the first place? - then perhaps a different approach needs to be taken.

And this is exactly what the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction is doing with their approach to reducing poverty in Hamilton. Rather than taking the conventional approach, they are working in a multi-sectoral, collaborative manner to make the city of Hamilton the best place to raise a child. I think this approach is brilliant and have also blogged about why I think it is so, here. I am also glad to see that the Government of Ontario is using the same approach and way of thinking with their province-wide poverty reduction strategy Breaking the Cycle, as well.

This is where Social Innovation Generation's definition of transformative social change, or social innovation comes in:

An initiative, product or process that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. These social innovations have broad impact, durability and scale; and also have recognizable stages and phases linked to the dynamics of resilient systems.

In other words, social innovation or transformational social change, should have the capacity to impact a broad number of people on an ongoing basis, scaled across multiple sectors and communities spread apart by large geographical distances, and can adapt and respond to massive change while still maintaining the integrity of the original. It is important to note that I use the word resilience instead of sustainability in this case, as resilience is about having the capacity to adapt to change, whereas sustainability, focuses on maintaining a stable state at any scale.

I also went through the Adaptive Cycle, using the birth, growth, destruction and renewal of a forest, to demonstrate how patterns found in ecological systems, can also be applied to social and political systems as well. Social Innovation Generation has a great primer on resilience and the adaptability cycle on their website, for those of you who would like to gain a deeper understanding on this topic.

And with that, I rounded off the workshop with an exercise and a facilitated discussion that I hope helped to illuminate further understanding of the concepts that were presented in a short amount of time.

I hope it was a great learning experience for everyone who attended. It was certainly a great learning experience for me as well, helping to solidify my understanding of the theory behind the work that has sparked my passion and interests for close to two years now. I am certainly excited for the road ahead.

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More thought-provoking Art | Part 2

I discovered Posterous a couple of weeks ago and found it to be a very useful tool - not only is it a great way to update my facebook status and minifeed, twitter as well as my flickr photostream (should there be any photos included) all at the same time, but it is also a great place to bookmark interesting stories, photos or videos that I come across online to share with people.

That being said, I have now linked my blog, www.renjie.ca to my Posterous, so that it will automatically update whenever I decide to post and share information related to social change. I realize that there is still a lot more to learn about using and leveraging social media technology, and Im taking this learning in strides.

As a follow up to Can passion give you blinders?, below are more photos of thought-provoking art from the scenario planning workshop for the Waterloo Region held in Elora, Ontario, last week.

Photos courtesy of RENDER.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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NY Times Op-Ed: End the University as We Know It

Below is an interesting opinion editorial that appeared in the NY Times a couple of days ago, and it relates to some of the work that SiG@Waterloo is doing through the development of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI), being spearheaded by Thomas Homer-Dixon, Frances Westley and a number of other professors at the University of Waterloo.

Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation

In the coming decades, rapid systemic change on multiple levels will contribute to global problems, potentially inducing pandemics, violent meteorological events, and social and political unrest. The weakening of national public institutions, widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing scarcity of high-quality energy, and worsening damage to the global environment coupled with increased global connectivity will erode systemic resilience and boost the incidence of surprising and even catastrophic change.

The goals of the Waterloo Institute are to:

Develop a common, transdisciplinary language and methodology and an integrated, coherent theory for the study and pedagogy of complex adaptive systems; and, • Apply these tools to stimulate rapid and beneficial innovation that will increase the resilience of complex adaptive systems worldwide – including social, political, economic, and ecological systems – that are currently under threat.

If you are interested in finding out more about WICI, please check out the videos of all of the WICI Seminar Series, that began last September 2008. They are available here

End the University as We Know It

The world is certainly changing, and there seems to be a groundswell of people waking up and realizing that we need to change our mindset and the way we live/organize ourselves as a society (local, national, global), in order to adapt and become resilient as we face the challenges of the road ahead.

It seems that Mark Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, who penned the NY Times opinion editorial below, argues that our institutions of higher education and learning need to adapt to this changing world as well.

Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
Published: April 26, 2009

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities.... The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course - with no benefits - than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Read more here.

Mark Taylor then goes on to outline six ways in which these institutions of higher learning can change in order to become more adaptive to the complexities of the problems we face in the 21st century (summaries below):

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding to undergraduate programs, where the curriculum is like a web or complex adaptive network, where teaching and scholarship are cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

2. Get rid of permanent departments at universities, and instead, create problem-focused programs, such as a Water Program, where the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose very significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties in the coming future, as well as serious political and economic challenges. These programs will have a limited time-frame and will be constantly evaluated, resulting in the program being abolished, continued or significantly changed.

3. Encourage increased collaboration among institutions, leveraging the internet and online video-conference tools as a means of communication.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation of published "books" with more footnotes than text, and encourage graduate students to produce "theses" in alternative formats, using analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites, to films and video games.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students, exposing them to new approaches, different cultures as well as real-life considerations, helping them cultivate skills that will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure, and replace it with seven-year contracts, enabling colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

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Can passion give you blinders?

And some thought-provoking art

I was at a 3-day scenario planning workshop for the Waterloo Region at the Elora Mill Inn, in Elora, Ontario, last week, and this particular piece of art on the window really got me thinking....

From picture 1: "Can passion give you blinders?"

Since I came across it, this question is all I can think about. It has led me to question some of the underlying assumptions as to why I do the work that I do, and why the notion of social change really interests me, making sure that I am doing all this for the right reasons.

It seems that passion can really only take you so far. In the end, you need to back it up with a well-thought out strategy followed by a deliberate action plan. Passion can certainly be thought of as a 'multiplier' in this case, so if there is no map that showcases the way forward and you really only have passion to go by, the chances of achieving success are very low.

To provide some context for these photos, SiG, together with rare Charitable Research Reserve, Musagetes and RENDER, hosted a three-day scenario planning exercise for the Waterloo Region, with a diverse group of thought-leaders and practitioners, to think through and plan different future scenarios for the Region in the next 10-20 years. More on this later.

A team of very talented artists from RENDER, were on-site to help provide artistic interpretation and intervention, providing a mirror, if you will, that reflected the dialogue and questions that emerged throughout the scenario planning.

At the end of the day, there really seems to be something powerful in art that reflects and captures the essence of creative dialogue geared towards social change.