Renjie Butalid

This blog post originally appeared on SiG@Waterloo’s blog on February 2, serving as a quick recap to the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation. David Yoon and Hilary Abel also have their take on the evening. Feel free to leave other blog post recaps of the Waterloo Lecture in the comments section. That said, the video of the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation featuring Adam Kahane is now online and I have re-posted it from the SiG@Waterloo website below.

I am currently reading Adam’s book, “Power & Love: A Theory & Practice of Social Change”, and will post a book review and my thoughts when I am done. My review of his first book, “Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities”, can be found here.

On Wednesday January 27, over 200 people gathered in the packed atrium of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario, for the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation featuring Adam Kahane. A further 150 people were able to join us online for the live webcast of the Waterloo Lecture.

A social innovator, once praised by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, we were pleased to have Adam Kahane join us to deliver the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation and to launch his new book, “Power & Love: A Theory & Practice of Social Change”.

As a partner with Reos Partners, an international organization dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems, Adam has worked with a diverse range of colleagues and organizations in more than fifty countries on a variety of challenges all over the world. Some of these challenges include addressing critical developmental issues in the transition from apartheid in South Africa; implementing the peace accords that ended the civil war in Guatemala; reducing child malnutrition in India; unblocking political stalemate in the Philippines; as well as accelerating the shift to a low-carbon economy in Canada.

At the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation, Adam drew on his experience with leading multi-stakeholder change processes to offer practical guidance for effectively balancing power and love, two-always present, usually polarized, often undiscussable-drives.

All tweets with the #waterloolecture hashtag can be found here

Photos from the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation can be found below.

Posted via email from renjie’s posterous

WLU Global Citizenship Conference January 2010

I was invited to present a workshop on social innovation/social change this past weekend at the Wilfrid Laurier University Global Citizenship Conference 2010, where past keynote speakers have included Stephen Lewis and Romeo Dallaire. This year’s keynote speaker featured Andrea Smith, professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and a nominee for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

My workshop at the WLU GCC was largely based on the workshop that I developed and delivered in July 2009, entitled Opportunities to Create Social Change, building on the work of Frances Westley and Brenda Zimmerman and their work on complexity and resilience theory. Of course, I tailored it to fit the context of the conference, discussing ways the individual person can adopt a complexity and resilience lens, as well as use the adaptability cycle in a practical manner, to better understand the process of social innovation, or transformative social change.

After I posted a recap and shared the slides from my workshop on my blog last summer, I got a response almost immediately from Melissa Richer, Executive Director of the Ayllu Initiative in Brazil (whom I had previously connected with on Twitter), clearly articulating why young people want to change the world, not out of ‘youthful idealism’, but rather, as an imperative need to survive in a world faced with intractable and increasingly complex social problems.

If you haven’t read Melissa’s guest blog post yet, I would recommend that you read it here.

And finally, I would like to thank the organizers of the WLU Global Citizenship Conference 2010 for the invitation to present my workshop and for putting on a great event.

I would also like to highlight an organization called NationWares, a social enterprise based in the Waterloo Region founded by Amie Sider, an undergrad student at Wilfrid Laurier University, that promotes the pillars of sustainability through micro-enterprise and fair trade.

Thank you for the amazing speaker gifts!