Centre for Social Innovation - Where Change Happens!

Sharing for Social Change

Centre for Social Innovation Board Report – A Year in Review 2007-8

April 2008 – adapted for the CSI blog

The following is a report that was provided to the board of directors for CSI.

This is a fascinating article about the emergence of partnerships between big corporations and social entrepreneurs. It provides a great overview of the types of partnerships that we are seeing evolve and some of the associated risks...

It starts..... "Big firms are joining the queue to follow in Muhammad Yunus’s footsteps by developing businesses designed to fix social ills..." http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=5823

 

 

For nearly four years, CSI has been doing an intense experiment in sharing... a concept that I thought we were supposed to learn in kindergarden (but most of us clearly didn't). We have learned a ton of what to do and what not to do and we thought it was about time to extend the experiment. So, this time, we decided to invite all three levels of government and multiple parties, funders, innovators and 100 others to the Centre to learn about sharing? What disasters might emerge?

The Centre for Social Innovation was a proud co-host, along with MaRS, BCG and TCSA, of the Social Entrepreneurship Summit on Dec 3-4. The proceedings are nowIt was a pleasure and an honour to work with our co-hosts of the Summit. I am sure that it available at www.marsdd.com/socialentrepreneurshipsummit. General feedback on the Summit was that it was a great networking event that brought in a lot of new faces. It was kind of like a coming out party, where people that have been doing it for years, could finally call themselves 'social entrepreneurs.'  

Paul Martin has written a great op ed in todays Toronto Star that is worth the read. Fabulous to have this voice in support of hybrid social entrepreneurship.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/304142

A very compelling read, but still a little light on specific strategies. I guess that those strategies are up to us. Also exciting to see that in my inbox today the Causeway group in support of social finance is making an ask to support the establishment of an independent panel to study ways and means of promoting various forms of social finance.

Our very own Eli Malinsky has just published a pair of articles based on his graduate-level research.  Eli looked at the ways in which technology becomes institutionalized within networks of nonprofit organizations, and how this reflects the unique nature of network structures.

One of the main projects of the emerging Ontario Non Profit Network (ONN) is the Ontario government’s recent process to modernize the nonprofit legal framework in Ontario. It’s pretty clear that if the government is going to make changes to the legal framework for nonprofits in Ontario, that we had better get organized… and indeed, that is what is happening.

When we created the Centre for Social Innovation, one of the driving forces behind it was the instinctive desire to build connections. There was a sense that if we could only just get the social mission sector connecting with each other that they would start to build a deeper knowledge of how our issues are integral to each other. We imagined communities of practice emerging and we dreamt of actually seeing groups working together to move their issues forward. We dreamt of cross-sectoral movement building. Ahh… what a dream

The Social Entrepreneurship Summit was a great success!

With 250 people from a wide range of backgrounds and over 100 people on the waiting list (so sorry), I think that we have tapped into something powerful.