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The UWA Business School's Centre for Social Impact and the Western Australian Department for Communities, welcomed Canadian social innovators Al Etmanski and Vickie Cammack to Perth in May to share their experiences during a free public lecture at The University of Western Australia.

Al and Vickie have been social innovators in Canada for almost 30 years. Through their vast experience in what is still an emerging field in Australia, they shared their work and how they have achieved impact, durability and scale.

"Instead of creating lots of nodes we looked at how to put our processes and the values of creating a full citizen experience, into the mainstream," said Vickie.  "Our aim was to change the cultural consciousness from needs and inability, to contribution and participation."

Vickie highlighted the work of her socially innovative organisation Tyze, an online personal network supporting and connecting people experiencing life challenges.

Al outlined six patterns in creating durability and scale in social innovation:

• Thinking and acting like a movement - such as the slow food movement, or other innovations which have inspired multiple actions, long timeframes and diverse levels of engagement.
• Convening networks for engagement, collaboration and inspiration and which employed the ideal that power and love must co-exist to make impactful and positive change.
• Making it easy to do the right thing by creatively framing the idea and sharing tools and processes to make it happen.
• Harnessing market forces so that financing of innovations attracted the emerging new sources of capital - such as social impact bonds.
• Doing public policy together and co-creating change.
• And the principle that ‘who' is more important than ‘how'.

Media references

Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
M: 0419 950 027
E: [email protected]