Giving Compass' Take:

• Re-Code, an initiative of the McConnell Foundation, is helping higher education institutions produce innovations that will help drive progress in systems change across Canada. 

• How can donors encourage other universities to focus on systems change projects? 

• Learn more about embedding changemaking into higher education. 

Higher education has long been a crucial part of social progress, through its core functions of teaching and learning. But as society’s needs change, a new type of post-secondary institution is growing in prominence: one that also plays a key role as a civic actor, driving local and regional community development.

It takes more than good intentions, however, to develop a community-driven agenda. It takes rewiring institutional structures and cultures for collaboration. Yet to achieve that, a field catalyst is needed to spark and amplify the development of a new social infrastructure.

In 2016, recognizing the need for increased collaboration, and the lack of organizations working across silos and sectors in Canadian higher education, the McConnell Foundation began exploring how it might play the role of field catalyst. At the McConnell Foundation, we work not only as a funder, but also as a strategic learning partner, convener, capacity builder, and neutral broker. We were therefore well-positioned to play a bigger role in fostering relationships between innovators, influencers, administrators, faculty, and policy makers in order to accelerate and scale the adoption of social innovation practices in postsecondary. Launching the Re-Code initiative to do this was a natural evolution in our 80+ year history of working in higher education.

Re-Code aims to fill in the gaps, mainstreaming innovations that could potentially shift the system in positive directions. By surfacing innovative ideas, connecting clusters of individuals working under similar motivations, and injecting resources (funding, tools, knowledge, human resources), we take on the risk of testing progressive ideas and the burden of scaling promising ones. This allows projects to get to a scale at which larger membership organizations can get behind them, and other funders can see proof of concept.

Read the full article about systems change in higher education by Kelly Hodgins & Chad Lubelsky at Stanford Social Innovation Review.