2011 "Innovators in Action" Speaker Series
SiG@Waterloo's 2011 Innovators in Action Speaker Series featured applications of social innovation on various issues within complex systems - this year's series focused on education, youth social infrastructure, vulnerable populations, social technologies, community resilience and social finance. Each of the keynote speakers shared their experiences in working to identify and address the root causes of intractable social challenges. Each presentation was followed by a discussion with local panel members who shared their reflections on the ideas and offered their own insights.
April 20, 2011
Vickie Cammack is committed to improving the lives of individuals and families experiencing major challenges that isolate them from others and from society. As co-founder of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN), a pioneering social initiative, Vickie lead the development of innovative responses to decrease the isolation and loneliness experienced by people with disabilities. Vickie continues to use her first hand experience of the power of individuals within systems to facilitate positive change, and her belief in the need to recognize the potential in connecting informal and formal systems of care.
In her talk, Vickie described how she and her organization are building on the immensely successful work of PLAN and the PLAN Institute of Caring Citizenship, to develop a new social technology, TYZE. TYZE was launched as a social enterprise and is being used as a tool to support and re-engage vulnerable members of our society.
May 18, 2011
Chris Kang, co-founder of Schools Without Borders and Violetta Ilkiw, of the Laidlaw Foundation, are widely respected experts in designing, implementing, and evaluating award winning approaches to education, community health and youth engagement.
In this talk, Chris and Violetta shared their experiences and insights from working with youth for social change. They discussed how their experiences have supported the development of the Youth Social Infrastructure Collaborative, which is a community that accelerates and amplifies the conditions for youth-led organizing and engagement in Ontario.
June 9, 2011
Stephen Quilley is currently the Senior Lecturer in Environmental Politics at Keele University. A unifying thread in Quilley's academic research is that we have inadvertently created a society in which people work too hard in order to consume too much; that we buy stuff mainly because we don't have time to do anything (even with the stuff we buy); that we are hitting ecological ‘limits to growth’; and that along the way we have high divorce rates, unhappy children, anorexic teenagers, appalling public health problems and crises of social cohesion.
For two hundred years, people have experienced the flip-side of material prosperity as a loss of meaning – alienation, the loss of a sense of self-sufficiency, the feeling of being a cog in a vast machine. Stephen’s talk explored the significance of this quest for meaning – a meaningful relationship with other people, with our environment and with the products that we make, use and consume.