Wednesday, February 28, 12noon, Kirwan Institute, Conference Room 101, 33 W. 11th Ave. [this event will also be occurring via Zoom]

Most would agree that there are social problems that are getting worse despite many efforts to address them. Growing wealth and income inequality are common phenomena across the industrialized world. Reversing these trends in inequality will likely take fundamental changes to the institutional environment in these countries and in the way that our global systems are organized. Climate change presents an existential threat to some countries and new opportunities and challenges for others. Coordination is essential to reduce the warming of the globe, yet difficult to secure. At the same time, individual countries face unique challenges where new approaches are needed. For example, the United States has experienced a dramatic rise in the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness and policy makers and practitioners are scrambling to develop solutions.

In the face of global and local challenges, “Social Innovation” has emerged as a framework to catalyze social change. Rarely has the social sector explicitly used innovation frameworks to address novel or entrenched problems. I argue that social innovation needs to be understood as an iterative, inclusive process that intends to achieve more effective and just solutions that address complex social problems. This includes strategies to imbed coproduction, experimentation, and scaling in order to disrupt the status quo and alter systems. In this forum, we will discuss what is necessary to activate social innovation and provide an application to our work in homeless services in Los Angeles.

RSVP for this event by using one of the two below links.

Online registration.

In-person registration.

Hosted by Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University.