New Courses on Social Innovation Developed at Waterloo

One of SiG@Waterloo's goals is to explore a variety of ways that we can support people to learn about how social change happens in the world. This gives us the opportunity to share the new knowledge and understandings that our research team is discovering, as well as point to fascinating examples that are highlighted in our expanding series of Canadian case studies. As part of reaching that education goal, we're beginning to launch some newly designed courses related to social innovation at the University of Waterloo.

Student interest has been very high and we've seen significant enrollment in the four courses that we've piloted so far. Frances Westley and Thomas Homer-Dixon have teamed up to offer a graduate level multi-disciplinary seminar course. Our two SiG faculty members are also very much involved; for example, this winter, Carin Holroyd is offering a course through Political Science on Social Entrepreneurship. And last Fall, Dan McCarthy led an undergraduate service-learning course through Environment which explored systems and complexity and the links between social and ecological resilience, all connected to real-world projects that the students got involved in to assist environmental organizations.

For the second year, I'm currently leading a small undergraduate course through the Faculty of Arts, called Leadership for Social Innovation. The students and I are exploring some of the social innovation concepts and models that help to understand how to connect strategy, design and action for social action that works! They're a terrific group of young leaders who have designed an intervention that they hope will connect the energy and resources of UW students to address some aspects of local hunger issues.

I think I can speak for all of our SiG faculty and staff, when I say that our work with students, and young people generally, is one of the most rewarding - and inspiring - parts of our work!