Becoming a Changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

This is a free 6-week course offered by the University of Cape Town via Coursera. It is for those who want to make a difference in the world, hence will take you on a journey of exploring problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. You will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. Innovative people see resources where others don’t, and they can bring those resources to bear. There’s transformative power in shifting from blaming the government, looking at needs, gaps, and what’s wrong, to appreciating utilizing available little resources.

Through developing a strength-based mindset one can discover hidden or underused resources. These resources might be people, knowledge, time, waste materials and spaces etc.

As soon as you start seeing resources all around you, not only can you move forward but you become energized, and creative things start to happen. You’ll find that you might be a lot richer than you think in terms of what you have to start building your own social innovation with. Part of our challenge on the journey to becoming changemakers is to learn how to become comfortable with discomfort and how you surround yourself with people that you normally do not engage with. Getting out of your comfort zone takes a little bit of courage because it makes you uncomfortable, but that’s how you build the competencies, the personal resilience, the drive for innovations and make differences in communities that are operate in a different way.

Human-centred design is incredibly important, and the Design Thinking process allows you to start early and wherever you are with whatever you’ve got. Design Thinking helps you to connect more with people and with communities so that you can actually design solutions that are human-centred. Powerful Design Thinking methodology can help you to come up with human-centred design solutions that manifest economic viability, technical feasibility and social desirability in your social innovation.

Register for this course here https://www.classcentral.com/course/social-innovation-6655 and let me know where you need more tips and I will help you out.

(a) Udegboka Tessie Nkechi ; local2global4@gmail.com; Whatsapp +2348033842029

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