Eli Malinsky's blog

On May 14, the Centre for Social Innovation hosted an event for Startup Canada entitled Starting up Social Innovation. Startup Canada is a national effort to build a more supportive environment for entrepreneurs and small business throughout our country.

CSI Member Strategic Sustainable Investments has just completed research on behalf of Ethical Markets Media for their February 2011 Green Transition Scorecard. The Scorecard has been tracking private investments since 2007 in green companies and technologies globally, now totaling more than $2 trillion.

This is astonishing growth in an emerging sector and seems by all accounts to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Evil evil Wal-Mart. Crushes the competition, strong-arms its suppliers and perpetuates a consumerist monoculture. What does Wal-Mart have to do with social change - at least, 'positive' social change?

Well, it turns out that Wal-Mart has just announced a five-year plan "to cut prices on healthy food and press its suppliers to cut back on sodium, sugar and trans fats in their packaged products."

My guess is that this change - if they stick to it - will do more to counter the rise of obesity than any government program.

We are hiring a youth coordinator for Project Wildfire, a new CSI-led social enterprise incubator targeted at youth aged 19-29 in the city of Toronto. For more information, please visit http://projectwildfire.ca or download the attachment.

Please note: applicants should be aged 19-29 as well.

Okay, well it's not really an Amusement Park, per se, but the new Social Innovation Park in Bilbao, Spain promises to be an extraordinary space of creativity, solutions and a wee dose of fun. The idea for a Social Innovation Park was originally conceved at the 2007 Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) "summer school" in San Sebastien.

In the great nebulous field that is social innovation, one of the ongoing debates is whether the term should be used to describe any effort aimed at social change or whether the term should be reserved for thos efforts that lead to systemic impact. How new, how big and how creative does an effort need to be to earn the label "social innovation"?

It's official: The Centre for Social Innovation Annex is now open! The space looks beautiful and the members are starting to roll in. We don;t often have Office Suites available and now's your chance to become part of our dynamic community of social change organizations.

Social Finance refers to forms of capital intended to produce a blended value social and financial return on investment. There are new social finance instruments popping up all over the world, from CSI's own "community bond" to the UK's social impact bond (a pretty amazing innovation!). In Canada, despite the work of a few notable stand-outs (e.g., socialfinance.ca), the conversation hasn't matured very far.

We need your help to find an AWESOME EA that is also an amazing community engager and social butterfly! Could this be YOU? Do you someone who it could be? Help us make our team even more kick-ass by adding on someone with impeccable EA skills!!

Click here for the job posting.