 Welcome
to this websection on sustaining social innovation!
This section of the website has been developed
to track the evolution, growth and learning of a group of
Canadian practitioners who are concerned with applied dissemination
(AD) and sustaining social innovation (SSI).
The Applied Dissemination practitioners
group is made up of organizations that are receiving funding
from The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation for a variety of
initiatives, many of which have grown to become pan-Canadian
in scope. Since 2002, this group has been meeting annually
at the invitation of the McConnell Foundation. The purpose
of the meetings has been to share strategies, experiences
and dilemmas, and to draw inspiration from one another and
from a variety of experts on topics such as scaling up, tracking
progress, the life-cycles of social change initiatives, social
marketing, and complexity theory.
The McConnell Foundation has launched this
site with the support of Tamarack
- a participant in the group and an organization with a rich
experience in designing and supporting learning processes.
Through it, we hope to deepen and share what we are learning
as a group (funders, researchers and practitioners alike)
about the processes of Applied Dissemination and Sustaining
Social Innovation. While Tamarack is presently hosting the
learning site, it will be transferred to the McConnell Foundation’s
new web site to be launched in the fall of 2006. In the meantime
Tamarack is providing the technical and design expertise to
support McConnell Foundation’s content.
On these pages, members of the AD/SSI learning
community will share learning, draw inspiration, and build
their collective capacity.
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 The
J.W. McConnell Family Foundation coined the term “Applied
Dissemination” to refer to the documentation
and dissemination of a concept, a program, a skill set, or
a process, and the subsequent application of one or more of
these in a new setting. The Foundation believed that the simple
dissemination of knowledge was not enough to ensure that it
would be picked up and used by communities or organizations.
In 2001, we published a set of guidelines called “Should
you Sow What You Know?” with the intention of helping
prospective grantees and their funders to think through the
process of Applied Dissemination. (Related terms include ‘replication’
and ‘scaling up’).
Over time the Foundation realized that bringing
organizations together that are involved in these kinds of
projects is a valuable way to share learning, draw inspiration,
and build collective capacity, and we have launched an ongoing
learning community for that purpose.
 The
“Sustaining Social Innovation” (SSI)
initiative is a two-year (2005-2006) collaboration to improve
the practice of social problem solving in Canada. Drawing
on the experience of leading innovators in the private, voluntary
and academic sectors, the initiative is concerned with how
to develop, apply and evaluate ‘breakthrough’
initiatives that address intractable, deep-rooted social problems.
Whereas the Applied Dissemination program
is primarily concerned with questions of program growth, or
‘scaling up’, SSI is also focused on the design
and evaluation of such initiatives – and on how they
are sustained over time. It is also exploring how to foster
a climate of continual innovation in organizations and institutions
concerned with social change. The lead partners in SSI are
the McConnell
Foundation, PLAN
Institute for Caring Citizenship and DuPont
Canada.
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 “The
Foundation's funding decisions are underpinned by three factors:
first, the decisions of our Trustees, who collectively represent
almost two hundred years of experience in foundation governance;
second, our "comparative advantage" as a private
grant-maker, which leads us to focus on issues and concerns
that governments and the private sector are unwilling or unable
to address; and third, our judgment about challenges Canadians
face that may respond to constructive foundation initiatives.
Learn more here!
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