Social Innovation in Hamilton

MaRS CEO, Ilse Treurnicht, and our director of social entrepreneurship, Allyson Hewitt, are headed to McMaster University today to speak at their Innovation Cafe in partnership with the Golden Horseshoe Biosciences Network. It’s a conversational-style forum exploring how social innovation — often in combination with technological innovation — is working in their community and beyond.

The Hamilton groups are among a growing number of organizations worldwide working to increase public awareness of social innovation at the grassroots level — and putting into action the unique strengths of post-secondary institutions to help their host communities think, plan and act differently in the face of significant social change.

Check out this informative feature story in yesterday’s Hamilton Spectator:
“Innovation also helps meet social needs”

ENP comes to Toronto!

As more and more people get into the business of doing good, resources and opportunities are arising, slowly but surely, to meet the demand. For those established do-gooders (the great folks working in non-profits and charities) there’s some refreshing news on the financial front: There’s a new kid in town!

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One of the biggest challenges faced by non-profit and charitable organizations is finding volunteers to help them to do the work to achieve their goals. Recognizing this, many non-profit organizations have shifted a significant portion of their time and effort to develop strategies to recruit, retain and motivate volunteers versus the traditional focus of trying to figure out ways to get more funding. The quest is challenging and few organizations can legitimately claim they have a proven mechanism to engage and retain volunteers. Well, except for one: the Framework Foundation, an organization that spurs volunteerism — not for itself, but for the benefit of other organizations — might just have the perfect solution.

Anil Patel, the Executive Director of the Framework Foundation, has created an innovative program called the Timeraiser. This annual event has proven wildly successful in encouraging people to donate their time to worthy volunteer opportunities. If you are skeptical, read on, but also check it out for yourself as the event will be held in Toronto’s famed Distillery District Fermenting Cellar on Saturday, April 5th, 2008. Doors open at 7pm.

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George Bernard Shaw:
“…All progress depends on the
unreasonable man”

If you are anything like me, you loathe household duties. But they have to get done, so I try to use the time as constructively as possible by listening to podcasts (you don’t need a fancy player, just a computer with an internet connection and some speakers).

Recently, Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast interviewed John Elkington, Founder and Chief Entrepreneur of SustainAbility and author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, along with Social Entrepreneurship Summit speaker and Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Pamela Hartigan. The two distill their observations about what makes a highly effective social entrepreneur tick, and how other business leaders can learn a few things along the way.

During this interview, they tether out three traits of social entrepreneurs.

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9th Annual Social Enterprise Summit

I had the pleasure of attending the Social Enterprise Summit in Boston last week at the regal Park Plaza Hotel.

The two days were packed with activities that were divided into two tracks: educational sessions led by leaders and practitioners in the field, or structured networking activities that were dialogue-based.

The agenda took a soup-to-nuts approach, covering everything from start-up to scale-up, from strategic partnerships to influencing public policy.

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From Stanford Session courtesy SSIR

Kudos to Stanford for marking February 24^th Social Entrepreneurship day.

“More than 150 people attended the Social Entrepreneurship Day panel, which was sponsored by Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Center for Social Innovation. The second annual Stanford University event, held February 24, brought a diverse, standing-room-only crowd and featured a lively discussion on ways to fund social enterprises, moderated by Kriss Deiglmeier, Executive Director of the Center for Social Innovation. Panelists included dynamic social sector leaders Jenny Shilling Stein (Draper Richards Foundation), Jessica Jackley Flannery (Kiva.org), Amy Clark (Ashoka), and Suzanne McKechnie Klahr (BUILD).”

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psiphon — an anti-internet-censorship tool designed by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — is the first recipient of a new award for digital pioneers chosen by an international group of specialists and awarded in Paris this month.

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A market in my hometown is blending community involvement and creative financing to support the expansion of their store.

Brothers Jamey and Robert Lionette of Lionette’s Market in Boston’s South End are pitching their plan, dubbed a Community Supported Market, to their neighbors.The Boston Globe reports that:

“…People who invest $10,000 will get a two-year stipend of $125 per week at the store (for a total of $13,000 in food). For $5,000, investors get a $55 weekly stipend for two years; $2,500 gives investors a 10 per cent discount on store items for two years…

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The beginning of December marked something besides the start of snowfall. It marked an unofficial opening of some rather large floodgates. On December 4th, MaRS, in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, The Toronto City Summit Alliance and the Centre for Social Innovation held the first ever national Social Entrepreneurship Summit.

The full Summit proceedings are now available on the Summit website.

Find out what the over 250 attendees from across the country heard from the fabulous keynote speakers from Canada, the US and the UK. While social entrepreneurship has been a hot topic as of late, the Summit seemed to ramp up the discussion even more, seeing the emergence of new partnerships and projects. Check out the highlights and the photos to get infused with the Summit experience.

This Global Attention Profiles map shows what countries were included in the New York Times news coverage of December 1, 2003. Countries in red received the most attention, while pink and blue countries received smaller and smaller amounts of media coverage.

That was Ethan Zuckerman’s emphatic message at the recent Ontario Library Association conference in Toronto. Zuckerman, a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, studies the intersection of technology and developing countries. He co-founded Global Voices Online, a “global citizens’ media project” at Berkman that collects and distills web content from across the world, particularly from the Global South; he’s also behind the Global Attention Profiles project (GAP), which monitors the geographic distribution of media attention.

Zuckerman provides a much-needed counterpoint to Thomas Friedman’s Gospel of Globalization, the idea of the digital revolution as great global equalizer. Zuckerman argues that an Internet connection alone cannot correct the vast disparities between developed and developing nations. While he recognizes the democratizing potential of such technology, he emphasizes the fact that persistent structural and systemic disadvantages keep Friedman’s dream from becoming reality.

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