Centre for Changemaking and Social Innovation, Georgian College, Barrie, and Canadian Freshwater Alliance
Authors: Nicole Norris and Lindsay Telfer
Description
A gigamap to inform a rural flourishing social enterprise ecosystem
Georgian College’s Centre for Changemaking and Social Innovation (CCSI) identified Social Entrepreneurship as one of the systemic areas where change-making knowledge and resources could support social impact in a uniquely Canadian rural context. Through its initiative SENCO (the Social Enterprise Network of Central Ontario), CCSI became accountable, by 2022, for the establishment of 35 provincial partnerships, 7000 individuals engaged and 70 accelerated Strongly Sustainable social enterprises within the rural regions surrounding our seven campuses.
As part of SENCO’s deliverables aligning to 70 accelerated Strongly Sustainable regional social enterprises, a curriculum framework was researched and designed to support individual community participants in developing a social enterprise idea using the Flourishing Business Canvas 2.0.
The Gigamap (Norris and Telfer, 2018) outlines the systemic context as to how this curriculum might shift a uniquely Canadian rural region towards a Flourishing Social Enterprise landscape. Its goal was to explore the possibilities of using the Flourishing Business Canvas 2.0 beyond bounded firms (and their actor ecologies), contributing to the socio-ecological research in systemic design offering potential to what might be the Canadian corollary of Politecnico di Torino program’s Systemic Design Field research in renewal and sustainability of rural communities. (Jones, citing Barbero, 2018)
Citation
Author. (2020). Article title. In Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD9) 2020 Symposium. India, October 9-17, 2020.