Social Innovation for Social Change
Exploring new ways of thinking and acting for a sustainable and just future.
Social Innovation
Social innovation has become like the flavour of the month, and like the term sustainable development it has many interpretations depending on your world view. Social innovation comes from the community development and social enterprise world, it encourages ingenious new ways to think about and addressing the complex problems we face. The old silos of government, community, and business begin to break down and transform as we move to a partnership model for organizations and systems based on principles of inclusion, participation, positive feedback loops, health ecosystems and collective rights.
Sustainability and sustainable development in my view, is a model of economic development that marries social, economic and ecological value and goals. It ends the hubris of living like there is no tomorrow and robbing our children and grand children of their right to a habitable planet and civil society.
Innovative Models for Community Development
Community and Stakeholder Engagement
Inspirational strategies to address apathy and cynicism for organizing your community and action campaigns.
Community Development Program Models
Successful mentorship, peer to peer support and peer advocacy, training for trainers programs that move from charity to social justice models.
Participatory Action Research
Powerful methods that empower people with lived experience in leadership for collective action and transformative results.
Social Enterprise
Blending the social purpose of community organizations with the prosperity of small businesses, social enterprises begin with idea jamming or idea generation and moves to conceptualizing a business model that fits. Dream and envision how to make change your business!
Restorative Practice
Healthy organizations that empower people is a goal achieved by regular practices for a healthy organizational culture and participatory structures.
Intrapreneurship
Leaders are not all CEO’s. You can make change from within organizations from any position and be a catalyst for community and collaboration from the top, the middle and the bottom.
Community Economic Development Planning
Imagine and economy that made health, not just money. Where local people build skills and jobs using local resources for local goods and services, where trade and procurement were not about exploitation and market share. Healthy people and a healthy planet are possible with whole community planning and CED.
Why Social Innovation for Social Change?
We can have a tendency when something isn’t working or is causing a problem to double down and do it more. Often this is because we can’t imagine another way of doing it, or because we don’t want to admit we are don’t know how to address the challenge. Social innovation encourages us to explore many alternatives to solving problems, and to challenge the process.
Success Stories
Hear how communities, leaders, and partners describe their experience of working together for meaningful change
I have worked with Marianne on worker engagement for the UFCW Security Sector membership. Marianne’s straight forward and direct approach in developing our project, and her ability to collaborate with multiple organizations and stakeholders provided the results our organization was striving for. It has given us significantly increased worker engagement and awareness of labour and workplace issues for this industry. Our collaboration has also given us a solid pathway to build on for this sector or our membership. I highly recommend Marianne as a “change agent” for any engagement project.
I first worked with Marianne when she was an advocate at the West Central Women's Resource Centre and I was chair of their board. I have continued to connect with Marianne on various projects over the past 2 decades. I have found her to be very resourceful and thoughtful. Marianne has a great ability to analyze situations and offer creative solutions.
The Community Development program was the best experience of all my schooling. There was historical context, plus applied skills. It brought all my skills together in a tangible way that could be applied in the community. The course Working Across Differences, taught by Marianne Cerilli, had a big impact on me. We unpacked all the assumptions we learn over our lives. It was about trying to understand other cultures, oppression, and colonization. It pushed me toward a genealogy search.
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