The fundamental purpose of social innovation should be to bring more beauty, peace and justice to the world. Its practices call for the capacity to listen and learn from shifting contexts and social landscape, and to co-design with others solutions to the issues that affect our communities. It takes into account existing and future relationships, notions of place and sovereignty, and requires a keen understanding of complexity and emerging ways to work with an eco-system mindset.
Social innovation is social because it rests on an explicit theory of social development and is rooted in the idea of progress: making society « function » better for everyone. First and foremost, it is social because it involves people. It calls for engaging people in the enhancement of their quality of life and figuring things out together. It is social because it involves an ability to work with a wide diversity of perspectives, levels and experiences, and to listen and act from a strong ethics of service and care. This requires curiosity, honesty and humility. It is social because it suggests a capacity to hold tensions and paradoxes that are at the heart of every human collective and get the work done because (and not in spite) of that.
Social Innovation is also social because it is anchored and embedded in places and territories and communities. Social innovations are tightly linked to the contexts from which they originate. They answer needs and reflect aspirations in communities. They foster a sense of belonging. Moreover, the very nature of the territory on which they emerge here (Canada) adds another layer of complexity to this : there is an intimate link between social innovation and the question of reconciliation, which may be the single most important social and ethical question that we have to learn to be in as Canadians in this century and in this place. If, as I believe, there is no social innovation outside of place, then in turn it means that a movement for social innovation needs to name and acknowledge its relationship to colonial power and the erasure of First Nations presence on the territory. The real work of social innovation is decolonization. It is un-settling in its core.
The word innovation suggests the idea of the new. However, social innovation is not so much about a new « thing » as much as it is about a capacity to see a social context with new eyes and perspectives. It means working from an understanding that reality is not fixed, that problems and contexts evolve and that the innovation truly lies in our ability to see the future as it takes shape, and move with it. Social innovation calls for an increased capacity to take in the complexity of the systems we live in, and shift the unhealthy patterns that create them and are created by them.
When put together, the social and the innovation parts help us broaden our understanding of our reality and the possibilities that it harbours. At the heart of this is the notion of the ecosystem, and of ecosystemic capacity building: the capacity to see beyond self and organization and present relationships, towards something that is much more fluid, dynamic, diverse and connected to life. Social innovation expands the sense of possibilities that are available to us, and shows us what we as humans can do together when we put our minds, hearts and wills in service of a purpose bigger than ourselves. Social innovation involves learning to be in our full capacity as humans, which I consider to be the most pressant need we have if we are to collectively tackle the urgent social, ecological and ethical challenges of our time. Only then will we become the collective force for the regeneration of planetary ecosystems that we can be.
ici - ailleurs 