About

What We Do & Why

The Social Innovation Collective is creating a new model for social innovation by breaking the silos between currently practiced methods and models.

Communities are tackling wicked challenges today. We want to tackle those challenges with them by partnering with community leaders, social entrepreneurs, impact creators who are passionate and persistent to manifest their visions in their communities.

We help our partners learn and implement tested and emerging tools for social innovation.

But we do not stop there, we also evaluate the effectiveness of those tools for the larger social innovation field. And also bring together problem solvers to experiment and build beyond the edges of social innovation.

Our partners and we, are adamant about long term systemic and sustainable change. We do everything with a people, planet and profit approach. No exceptions.

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Who We Are

We are an intentional collective of highly skilled 'Impact Facilitators' & 'Impact Creators'.

An 'Impact Facilitator' are proficient in creative problem solving. They hold the space for creativity and collaboration. They bring diverse perspectives and expertise in disciplines like design, entrepreneurship, behavioral science, applied economics, facilitation, institutional change and others.

'Impact Partner's' are individuals or organizations who are passionate and persistent to manifest their visions in their communities. They nurture trust based long term relationships with the people they serve. They implement and execute for impact.

We all share a common vision to help our communities thrive and also align on the principles and values that help us do that.

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Which role in the collective would you like to apply for?

Impact Facilitator - Holder of space for Innovation

Impact Partner - Implementor of Impact

Approach

The Social Innovation Collective approaches it's work by building on existing models, breaking the silos between different methods, and bringing mindsets into action.

Our work has three primary functions:

To help our impact partners navigate towards growth.
To tackle wicked problems 'with' communities, not for them.
To way-find for the future of social innovation.

Models

Social Innovation should be community led

Our efforts for innovation identifies the need to co-design with communities. We believe that lasting change has to be community led. We therefore focus on building the capacity of key community organizations and leaders to solve their most pressing needs, the benefits of which reach individuals.

Social Impact begins from the bottom up

We define social impact as the positive affect on an individual and families wellbeing. Therefore, we also focus our efforts with our partners to build the quality of people's everyday lives. We try to have impact through catalyzing the needs that help an individual thrive.

Therefore it is with the approach of affecting both individual impact and community led innovation that we strive to bring change in the world.

'Practice of Impact' instead of 'theory of change'

We don't have a 'Theory of Change' instead we use an active 'practice for impact' to guide our work.

Our 'practice of impact' helps us aim our outcomes towards systemic and sustainable impact. The three components of our model are Social Innovation (i.e tools and mindsets for innovation), Personal Innovation (i.e. tools and mindsets for people to thrive in everyday life) and Community Co-Creation (i.e grass-root engagement and empowerment). All our methods and mindsets stem from the interaction of these three components.

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Methods

To support our impact partners have systemic and sustainable change we need a robust innovation toolkit. This toolkit needs to be flexible and effective in helping us solve issues from the root rather than fixing symptoms. The Social Innovation Collective is curating such a toolkit by breaking the silos between different innovation methods. We let the specific needs of our partners and their communities decide how we use our toolkit. We have used the following methods individually, merged them or build on them to create new custom methods.

We are constantly learning and adding new methods to our toolkit.

HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE

LEAN METHODOLOGY

CRADLE TO CRADLE DESIGN

SYSTEMS THINKING

ETHICAL DESIGN RESEARCH

STORYTELLING FOR CONNECTION

COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION

FRUGAL & REVERSE INNOVATION

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Mindsets

Mindsets matter. Maybe a little more than the methods, therefore we operate with a Benefit Mindset and the following are some that we bring into action everyday.

CURIOSITY WITH COURAGE

REALISTIC OPTIMISM

RADICAL OPENNESS

AUTHENTICITY & INCLUSION

REFLECTION & INTROSPECTION

COMPASSIONATE COLLABORATION

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Collective

We are an intentional trans-local collective of highly skilled and sovereign - social innovators, organizations, regenerative practitioners, entrepreneurs, doers, thinkers, provocateurs, artists, musicians and badass earth walkers.

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Our Partners

The following are some of the organizations and initiatives we have/are collaborating with.

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The Incubator

Image Courtesy - Uncredited Google Image. If you are the owner of this image, please let us know so we can credit you!

We are fireweed…

When wildfires leave forest bare and prone to further devastation of erosion through floods due to lack of foliage. A pink pioneer (image above) called Fireweed emerges and performs the role of helping the forest regenerate. Source Courtesy.

We are fireweed for the social impact.

It all started when…

After years of working within the social impact industry: with foundations, social entrepreneurs, non-profits, innovation labs, I found within (myself and) the ecosystem - patterns of thinking that despite the best of intentions would leave me discouraged rather than hopeful for our species and planet. Where the impact outcomes were in most cases costly to the planet, people, and the places we were trying to help.

I starting living with a question “What is next for systemic transformation?” “What can we learn from attempts made thus far?”, “If at all, what are we missing?” This inquiry led me down many rabbit holes and exposed me to thinkers and doers of a realm new to me - From Buckminster Fuller, Fritjof Capra, Carol Sanford, Daniel Christian Wahl, Peggy Holman among others became my mentors and led me through a journey of discovering and learning.

This incubator is an experiment in that ongoing journey and inquiry.

Here is a whitepaper we are currently using to create a narrative of this journey and experiment. You are welcome to jump on and add your thoughts and comments.

Use the form below to get in touch with us with questions, comments and/or collaborating or if you would like to participate in the incubator. We want to operate outside of silos and welcome you to create this with us.

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The following entities are supporting us through the learning needed to create this incubator.

The Art of Evaluation in Complexity from Beehive Productions with http://www.chriscorrigan.com

The Social Transformation Lab of Presencing Institute