Who is this for?

This Booster Pack series is for individuals and organizations:

• Working in the social purpose space,
• Seeking skills and supports to help them tackle complex social challenges,
• Seeking to diversify funding sources through working towards investment readiness.

Why now?

Whether you describe it as “just recovery” or “building back better,” there is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has inspired wholesale rethinking of how we respond to complex problems. When solutions are being continually outpaced by the challenges they are meant to address, trying something new is necessary.

Social Research and Development (Social R&D) can help Social Purpose Organizations (SPOs) generate data, prototypes, and pilots that can help attract the resources required to deploy solutions at scale. This project is in particular connected to the Investment Readiness Program (IRP) aimed to support SPOs to access financing to help advance their initiatives.

Objectives

Through these sessions participants will:

• Discover an overview of social R&D history and practices.
• Build skills in leveraging social R&D to tackle complex challenges.
• Gain access to tangible social R&D tools/resources.
• Connect with other social purpose organizations and social R&D practitioners to enable future collaborations.
• Advance social purpose initiatives along the investment readiness continuum.
• Equip social purpose organizations to prepare for IRP applications.

Design

This 5-week learning experience has been designed in line with the 5 Practices for Social R&D: 

Tues. Feb 23: Preparing (R&D training and practice, R&D benchmarking, reflective practice community partnerships and co-production, resource allocations and organizational readiness)

Tues. March 2: Looking (Community-led inquiry, ethnography, literature reviews, case studies, data sourcing)

Tues. March 9: Thinking (Brainstorming; generating hypotheses; triangulating across small, big and open data)

Tues. March 16: Developing (Designing and testing, piloting, prototyping, designing feedback loops, coproduction)

Tues. Mar 23: Diffusing (Building/sharing capacity, aggregating/sharing lessons from success, failure and process development, leaping by learning)

This event series will culminate in the National Social R&D Gathering on March 30 and 31 which can be registered for here. 

Sessions will take place from 1-3pm EST (10-12am PST) and will include a combination of learning, application of new skills and resources, and network building with other SPOs and Social R&D practitioners.