Location:

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Program Type:

Study Abroad

Degree Level:

Undergraduate

Term:

Summer

Program Overview

Program Description:

The Social Innovation Safari is a two week immersive learning experience where designers, social workers, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners from around the world work together to problem solve real-life social issues. We’ll use a problem-solving approach, which is collaborative, action-oriented, and inherently social. We’ll work on the messy, complex social issues that are in desperate need of both new approaches & new solutions. The Safari is a methodology for developing our collective problem-solving capabilities and skills. Imagine joining an inter-disciplinary dream team, and discovering new ways to prompt social change!

At the Safari we tackle social challenges for Amsterdam organizations. Real world problems, constraints and commitments accelerate learning more than hypothetical classroom exercises. We will pay extensive visits to all the partner organizations during the Safari.

At the Safari we learn from real life social challenges. Challenges like educational disengagement and unemployment, which effect real people. First we identify the challenge: for whom is it a problem, what are the various definitions and versions of the problem? We will also focus on the role of the institutions & systems involved. In an environment of financial constraints, but a growing need for tailor-made solutions, how are we to act? What is even the role of formal institutions and systems? Indeed our starting point will not be these formal institutions and systems, but on different ways of organising to meet social needs and achieve real, measurable impact. The aim is not to solve social problems. The aim is to create new perspectives, new insights and new methods for problem solving. For this reason we partner with organisations in Amsterdam. They can be from the corporate, non-profit, cultural and the government sector and they are involved in the social challenge. This way we create a learning loop: the participants get a better understanding of what it means to be a social innovator and the partner organizations deepen their own innovation capacity, other stakeholders have a voice and can improve their problem solving capabilities as well. In the coming weeks the challenges will be identified. We are looking into challenges like youth employment, aging society, unpayable healthcare, and urban vancancy & sustainability.

Setting Description:

The content of the Safari is based for a great deal on the growing field of social innovation. With this we mean: new solutions that simultaneously meet a social need (more effectively than existing solutions) and enhance society’s capacity to act by creating new relationships, developing capabilities and/or providing better use of assets and resources. Over the last few years the field of social innovation – which is in nature practice based- has been getting more and more attention from policymakers, foundations, researchers and academic institutions. However, the field is still ill-defined, vague and lacks a coherent body of knowledge. This is partly because social innovation is a practice led field, that is cross-disciplinary and that has many different manifestations in different situations and places. This lack of clarity also has clear advantages and makes it an interesting topic to study during a summer programme: it is multi interpretable; it stimulates independent thinking an

Cost:

Tuition fee Non-credit: €2000 Credit: €2300