On April 3rd the YMCA Simcoe Muskoka and Georgian College Social Innovation annouced as part of the The Future of Belonging Project the launch of a Community Innovation Council to steward a Community Innovation Network.
This information session is an opportunity to explore this vision, what it will mean for the region and learn how to get involved in helping to form what this might look like.
About the Future of Belonging Project
The Future of Belonging Project was launched in November 2023 with the establishment of a Stewardship Committee tasked with working on data and insights collected from facilitated community workshops with distinct and unique cultural and social groups in our community.
Through the work undertaken in the Future of Belonging project to date, the Georgian College Social Innovation Team has identified gaps in the areas of social enterprises, grassroots community groups, and engaged citizenship that are crucial in driving bottom-up community innovation and fostering healthy communities and economies. Without nimble and action-focused ecosystem actors, our communities' ability to tackle complex issues such as housing, childcare, and food security becomes more challenging.
The vision for a future Community Innovation Network is to hopefully build new types of community capacity for innovation, provide opportunities to foster uncommon collaborations between community and industry sectors, and offer new tools and approaches that take into account climate, social justice, and equity.
The YMCA Simcoe Muskoka, in collaboration with Social Innovation at Georgian, will be establishing three pilot Community Impact Spaces within our community starting in Fall 2024 as part of the Community Innovation Network. These Community Impact Spaces will serve as accessible venues to foster engagement and participatory design for community innovation, as well as prototype how we might engage diverse communities in new and self-expressive ways.
We invite and encourage others to join the Future of Belonging Project and to participate in the Stewardship Committee, as a community member or front-line service provider, or to join the Project’s Development Team and co-design community engagement and the development of the network.
