Cheryl Kernot announces travel prize at SI camp
Sleepless innovators create community websites
A refugee buddy system won a special travel prize at Australia’s first Social Innovation Camp in Sydney yesterday.
Presenting the award to Joy Suliman of the Refugee Buddy team, Cheryl Kernot, Director of Social Innovation at the Centre for Social Impact, University of New South Wales, said it was exciting to see innovative and socially beneficial uses of new technology. The winning team received a return airfare and per diem allowance to attend a Social Innovation camp overseas.
Seventy idealists with innovative ideas for using social networking applications met for an intense weekend of code-writing, coaching and refining of business plans. Many innovators at the event went without sleep as they swapped ideas and overcame problems in the 8 shortlisted projects.
CEO Steve Lawrence said that all the projects had great merit and potential for social good. Most were expected to go online in 2010. The three singled out for special awards were:
• Refugee Buddy, a scheme to help volunteers link up with refugees who are in need of local knowledge and friendship. Refugee Buddy provides a warm welcome and promotes understanding.People can register their interest on the website, and refugee support organisations can contact suitable support people. This project is already online at www.refugeebuddy.org
• Two Bob’s Worth, a micro-volunteering project where busy people can offer skills to the community on a short-term basis.
• Interlocked Social Information Systems (ISIS), a sophisticated information-sharing site to allow service providers and researchers to share data, case studies, and other information of mutual interest. It would link grassroots terminology to more scholarly resources.
The Social Innovation Camp was an initiative of the Australian Social Innovation Exchange, www.asix.org.au
The event, held at the UNSW city conference centre, was sponsored by NonProfit Australia and the Centre for Social Impact. It was voted a success by all the sleep-deprived but excited innovators.
For further information contact Steve Lawrence on 0417488165.
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Re: Cheryl Kernot announces travel prize at SI camp
Vern has been a great spokesperson for social entrepreneurship. I always read his comments with interest. I don’t necessarily agree with them and in this instance I disagree strongly.
I was delighted that, at the Social Innovation Camp, Cheryl Kernot was able to hand out a scholarship on behalf of the Centre for Social Impact (CSI) to provide travel funding for someone from the Refugee Buddy project to visit a Social Enterprise Camp overseas. It will help widen horizons on social innovation and being back new ideas and contacts.
CSI had willingly provided financial assistance to ASIX for the camp. Cheryl and I had been actively involved in the planning, logistics, assistance and judging. We both found it an energising experience.
The scholarship is not a one-off. Indeed I am proud that CSI has been able to provide many such scholarships. For two years CSI has given financial assistance to help young people attend the International Internship Program of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, held in India. Last year CSI offered scholarships to 49 people from not-for-profit organisations to attend our executive programs. We now also have scholarships to help people undertake the new Graduate Certificate in Social Impact. To a significant extent this funding has been made possible by the generous financial backing that we have received from AMP, Chief Executive Women, Clayton Utz, Mrs Louise Gourlay, Macquarie Group Foundation, MBS Alumni, NAB, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Shark Island Foundation. All of this information is publicly available on our website at www.csi.edu.au.
Vern’s key point is that CSI should repay its money to the Commonwealth government rather than offer assistance to those who would otherwise not have the funds to access opportunities. Otherwise we’re not living socially entrepreneurial practice. I just don’t think that’s right.
The situation on the “$12.5 million hand-out from the taxpayers of Australia” is this. CSI received not a grant but an endowment of $12.5m from the Commonwealth government for 5 years. The sum must be preserved although CSI can use the returns on the endowment towards administrative costs. By the terms of the contract the $12.5m may need to be returned at the end of the period.
The endowment sits, of course, not with CSI but with a publicly-funded institution, the University of New South Wales. It represents one small part of the public funds that are provided to universities by the Department of Education (DEEWR) for capital infrastructure, research and teaching. Such public funding of higher education is entirely appropriate. In part it allows CSI to teach our new graduate courses in socially responsible business management.
The real value of the endowment is that CSI has been able to use it to leverage financial support from private philanthropists and corporate investors (indeed the restrictive terms of the endowment require CSI to match government funding). I report upon this transparently in our annual report: www.csi.edu.au
I must say that I don’t see any of this is at odds with CSI’s commitment to social enterprise. What would be the benefit of returning the endowment and having it become absorbed into consolidated revenue? In my view it would be an empty and wrong-headed gesture. I truly think that the beneficial impact CSI can have (including promotion of social innovation) represents a valuable use of the endowment that we administer.
Re: Cheryl Kernot announces travel prize at SI camp
If a group of service users - in disability, or aged care, or special education, or employment services - went to the Prime Minister and said "Excuse me, Mr Rudd, we'd like an endowment of $12.5 million please to develop social innovation in our services and, by the way, we won't place the money in consolidated revenue in our group's account we will use it to leverage private sector investment"..... just what response do you think they would receive?
A respectful hearing? Due consideration of capacity to deliver?
No. They would be laughed out of court.
I have been there and done that on more occasions than I care to remember when government advisers and bureaucrats, after a polite introduction, discover I am with a group of service users - parents, consumers, residents, families - and not with a group of service providers or university centres. The change in dynamics is clear and unequivocal.
To get a good insight into the power dynamics in Australian social policy and service systems, I'd recommend that all CEOs of publicly funded providers and centres should experience, at least once in their careers, the humiliation of sitting around a table with government advisers and bureaucrats and saying, with a straight face, that you represent a group of service users - families or consumers or benefit recipients.
See how you go.
Because if you haven't done this (and most CEOs of funded providers and centres NEVER have this experience in their entire careers) then you can have no real knowledge or understanding of the power dynamics on which our welfare, health, education, disability, ageing, indigenous affairs and employment services systems are built.
Vern Hughes
Re: Cheryl Kernot announces travel prize at SI camp
I'll leave CSI to make their own case. But no room for public investment in social innovation? Anywhere? Anytime? That's a tough call and one I suspect few countries or cultures could live by.
What's the difference investing $12.5 million in more programs from the Dept of Family and Communities or whatever and investing it in CSI, or some other similar body?
What if the government or CSI to give Vern Hughes or Martin Stewart-Weeks or The Smith Family or whoever some money for innovation and new approaches to working with dysfunctional families? Do we send it back and say thanks, but I'd rather earn it myself?
Public money never comes without strings and accountability mechanisms that potentially clash with the to prosecute the cause in which it invests. That's hardly new news. But then most investment, public or private, rarely comes without strings of some sort. And a good thing too presumably.
What's the theory or design principle here? I'm interested in the underlying structure of this criticism.
Re: Cheryl Kernot announces travel prize at SI camp
The 'underlying structure' of this criticism, is that social innovation rarely, if ever, results from public investment in middle men, in any field of activity.
It results from the initiative of 'users' of services, at the coal-face. This is perhaps the key theme in all of Charlie Leadbeater's writings about social innovation.
But in Australia, funders (government, philanthropic and corporate alike) only fund the middle men (service providers, management agencies, or research centres) and NEVER fund the end users.
Look at the recipients of 'public investment' in what might be called social innovation in Australia - the Centre for Social Impact ($12.5 million); Social Traders ($4 million); School for Social Entrepreneurs ($2 million); Social Ventures Australia (can anyone keep track of how many millions here?)..... and on it goes.
In every case, funds go to the middle men (well-intentioned managers and researchers) who then function as gatekeepers to the social innovation industry, sources of public information about this industry, and holders of resources tagged for the purposes of innovation.
In NO case does the public funding go to the people who Charlie Leadbeater describes as the characteristic authors of social innovation in the internet era - the users of services.
None. Zilch. Zero.
And what is disturbing about this pattern, and ultimately, self-defeating for social innovation, is that this pattern replicates exactly the failed pattern of public funding we are accustomed to in health, education, welfare and social support - being the areas where we most need social innovation in the first place. Resources go to the middle men in these fields, who THINK they know what end users want. The middle men invariably get it wrong, the end users want alternatives, and the seeds of social innovation are sown. BUT, the money is held by the middle men, not the users, which is the source of innovation gridlock in health, education, welfare, indigenous affairs, and on it goes.
To reproduce this pattern in the funding of social innovation middle men is to reproduce this gridlock in a fundamentally misguided and self-defeating way.
So instead of $12.5 million going to the Centre for Social Impact, that $12.5 million could, and should, have gone to groups of users of services who are actually doing some innovating, and not just talking about it. I could name a dozen such groups who have no salary or management expenses, who could move mountains with $12.5 million.
This is the underlying structure of what's wrong with the social innovation industry in Australia. It's driven by the wrong people, with other people's money, for the wrong purposes and the wrong projects.
Vern Hughes
Re: Cheryl Kernot announces travel prize at SI camp
Through a $12.5 million handout from the taxpayers of Australia, the Centre for Social Impact has been able to play Santa and offer a travel prize for the Refugee Buddy project to visit a Social Enterprise Camp overseas. Generosity is a fine virtue.
Wouldn't it be so much more innovative for CSI to generate revenue from its enterprise and repay the $12.5 million, treating it as a start-up loan rather than a handout?
Perhaps then the CSI could begin repaying its $12.5 million back to the taxpayers as a commitment to socially entrepreneurial practice?
I'd like to hear some views on this. Do feel free to speak up, folks - intellectual honesty and open discussion are very important values in an innovative society. Deference to hierarchy and acquiesence to established patterns of patronage are the enemies of social innovation. Always have been.
Vern Hughes