Co-Creating The Community Innovation Council

We would like to invite you to join us in setting the foundational parameters for the region's first Community Innovation Council.

We are looking for anyone who is interested in fostering a future-thinking community-driven innovation ecosystem, leveraging the outcomes of the Future of Belonging Project.

In 2023, Georgian College's Social Innovation Department and the YMCA Simcoe Muskoka embarked on a project called The Future of Belonging. The goal was to explore how community and social service organizations remain revelant in the changing landscapes of our communities as we look to 2030 and beyond.

On September 17th, 2024 the project's Year 1 Insights Report was released and outlined how we might develop more inclusive community innovation environments that help rural areas thrive economically and socially.

Insights gathered during the project highlighted an early finding: the need to establish a community-based ecosystem dedicated to building local capacity for developing innovative, equitable, and community-driven system shifts that address belonging, well-being, and economic challenges identified in the community. This early finding was based on data collected across diverse activities and engagements during the first year where we ‘explored’ the idea of belonging from various systemic and actors’ perspectives.

It recommend the design and development of:

1. A Community Innovation Network

A Community Innovation Network will foster collaboration and enable creativity for community-driven innovations of the future. It needs to include accessible physical spaces called Community Impact Labs. These Labs are to connect community and foster diverse groups using accessible design tools and resources to develop citizen-led change, support for non-profit strategic planning and start-up, social enterprise, and policy shifts.

1. A Community Innovation Council

The Community Innovation Council is a strategic membership-based body of diverse regional intermediaries in cooperation to enable community-driven innovation. Each member organization agrees to, based on the strength of their community capitals, bringing unique resources, expertise, and connections, to contribute to community innovations developed in the Community Innovation Network. The council acts as a governing body, overseeing and stewarding the network, helping to set community identified priorities, facilitating collaboration among members, enabling foresight and social innovation research, advocacy for systems change, and fostering the conditions for community-based and social impact financing infrastructures.

Working as part of an Ecosystem, the Community Innovation Network acknowledges the interconnectedness of the community, ensuring that solutions are developed with the involvement of those most historically affected by system barriers and amplified challenges such as healthcare access, affordable housing, and food insecurity. These co-designed innovations are then catalyzed with the support of system intermediaries (e.g. YMCA) whose extensive social and built capitals can foster conditions for adopting and scaling these approaches at relevant junctions (grassroots, and/or social or public sector). Through this chain of impact, enabled by the Community Innovation Network and stewarded by the Community Innovation Council, positive change is scaled across the community.

Host or Publisher The Future of Belonging