Social Labs and Collaborative Approaches to Systems Change: Live Discussion

The complex challenges of today – such as inequality, environmental changes, financial instability, etc. – can’t be tackled by any one organization, but require the collaborative effort of many. What is needed are open spaces that bring the relevant participants together, provide them with the tools and methodology to guide them through an experimental process for them to understand the issues they face and start to collaboratively build new solutions. 

In this live discussion, we will be exploring collaborative approaches to systems change, in particular the idea and practice of social labs. Variously referred to as systems innovation labs, living labs, change labs, co-labs or social labs all may be thought of as a way of doing social innovation and systems change in practice through creating platforms for collaboration. 

Guest speakers:

Zaid Hassan - CEO of 10 in 10
Author of "The Social Labs Revolution: A new approach to solving our most complex challenges" Zaid is a highly experienced facilitator, who has over fifteen years of experience supporting multi-stakeholder innovation working with governments, civil society and corporations. Recent clients include The World Bank, The UN Foundation, Oxfam, GIZ, the Governments of New Zealand and Canada.

Russ Gaskin - Managing Director of CoCreative Consulting
Rus helps people who don't know each other and often don't even like each other solve complex problems together. His team at CoCreative currently supports 18 multistakeholder innovation networks working on challenges like sequestering atmospheric carbon through agriculture, aligning bank lending with climate realities, closing racial equity gaps in health and education, and shifting upstream determinants of health.

Stephanie L. Daniels - Sr. Program Director at The Sustainable Food Lab
Stephanie works as the Senior Program Director for Agriculture & Development at the Sustainable Food Lab where she cultivates partnerships for impact and learning in agricultural value chains. The Food Lab creates a space in which diverse and influential leaders from different sectors can find game-changing solutions to tough challenges. Within the Sustainable food Lab, Stephanie's focus is on the theme of smallholder livelihoods.

Charlotte Hochman - Founder of Wow!Labs
Charlotte Hochman has spent the last 15 years building capacity for social innovation in civil society, the private and the public sectors. Her expertise is in developing tools and projects to catalyse people's capacity to innovate and create start-ups in response to global challenges. She is the Co-Founder of Wow!Labs and PLACE, a hub built to change the narrative around refugees by linking migration to innovation and the Future of Work.

The guests are joined by the host Bowen Feng, Community Manager at Systems Innovation.

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