This article is part of a series on social innovation. I started thinking more critically about philanthropy’s potential as I prepared my keynote address for this year’s Canadian Environmental Grantmaker’s Network (CEGN) annual conference. The theme of my talk was “decolonizing philanthropy.” In 2015-16, I was a fellow in the International Women’s Forum (IWF)…
Strategy: Social Innovation
In November 2018, Mowat NFP and the Community Safety Knowledge Alliance hosted Innovation in Evidence, a conference on evidence-informed policymaking. Internationally, evidence institutions like What Works Centres have been transforming how evidence is used in the policymaking process to address “wicked” social problems, ranging from social isolation among seniors to policing interventions for crime reduction….
This article is part of a series on social innovation. Three events over the course of one week in November 2017 shone a light on the past, present, and future of social innovation in Canada. At the Social Innovation Generation (SiG) Sunset event, 500 people gathered at MaRS in Toronto to celebrate the end of…
When the federal government released its Fall Economic Statement in November, it signaled what many in Canadian philanthropic circles would regard as a sea-change in Ottawa’s thinking about a sector that employs more than two million Canadians and accounts for 8% of the country’s GDP. After years of dealing with everything from outmoded legislation to…
The non-profit sector plays a substantial role in providing programs and services that contribute to Canada’s social, economic, and civic health. The role of non-profit organizations in collecting and mobilizing evidence deserves more attention because the sector is a key pillar in building the evidence base for policy. What is evidence-informed policymaking? This approach to…
This is the seventh article in a series about European philanthropy. The series is published as a collaboration between The Philanthropist and The Lawson Foundation. To bring about change and entrench it in our societies, there is a need for more social innovation at scale. It is possible: history is rich in examples of social innovations that have…
This is the sixth article in a series about European philanthropy. The series is published as a collaboration between The Philanthropist and The Lawson Foundation. For some time now, a new player has been getting ready to “hit the stage” of the social economy in Italy. The Italian government, with legislative decree no. 112 of July 3, 2017,…
This is the second article in our series about the role of networks in the non-profit sector. The series is published as a collaboration between The Philanthropist and the Ontario Nonprofit Network. From neighbourhood efforts to improve employment to national efforts to tackle climate change, non-profit organizations in Canada are increasingly turning to the science…
This article is the seventh in a series on social innovation. In 2013, the team at Ryerson University’s Faculty of Community Service invited me to join them as the inaugural John C. Eaton Chair of Social Innovation. The faculty has deep social justice roots and it created the position just as Ryerson became Canada’s first Ashoka Changemaker…
This article is the second in a series about European philanthropy. The series is published as a collaboration between The Philanthropist and The Lawson Foundation. How do we enhance giving in Canada? Or the positive societal impact of philanthropy? The answers to these questions seem to unite and divide the philanthropy sector. These questions were…