Approach
The Social Innovation Collective approaches it's work by building on existing models, breaking the silos between different methods, and bringing mindsets into action.
Our work has three primary functions:
- To help our impact partners navigate towards growth.
- To tackle wicked problems 'with' communities, not for them.
- To way-find for the future of social innovation.
Models
Social Innovation should be community led
Our efforts for innovation identifies the need to co-design with communities. We believe that lasting change has to be community led. We therefore focus on building the capacity of key community organizations and leaders to solve their most pressing needs, the benefits of which reach individuals.
Social Impact begins from the bottom up
We define social impact as the positive affect on an individual and families wellbeing. Therefore, we also focus our efforts with our partners to build the quality of people's everyday lives. We try to have impact through catalyzing the needs that help an individual thrive.
Therefore it is with the approach of affecting both individual impact and community led innovation that we strive to bring change in the world.
'Practice of Impact' instead of 'theory of change'
We don't have a 'Theory of Change' instead we use an active 'practice for impact' to guide our work.
Our 'practice of impact' helps us aim our outcomes towards systemic and sustainable impact. The three components of our model are Social Innovation (i.e tools and mindsets for innovation), Personal Innovation (i.e. tools and mindsets for people to thrive in everyday life) and Community Co-Creation (i.e grass-root engagement and empowerment). All our methods and mindsets stem from the interaction of these three components.
Methods
To support our impact partners have systemic and sustainable change we need a robust innovation toolkit. This toolkit needs to be flexible and effective in helping us solve issues from the root rather than fixing symptoms. The Social Innovation Collective is curating such a toolkit by breaking the silos between different innovation methods. We let the specific needs of our partners and their communities decide how we use our toolkit. We have used the following methods individually, merged them or build on them to create new custom methods.
We are constantly learning and adding new methods to our toolkit.
Mindsets
Mindsets matter. Maybe a little more than the methods, therefore we operate with a Benefit Mindset and the following are some that we bring into action everyday.
