Taylor Named Recipient of Ashoka U Collaboration Fund.

The Network Advisory Committee (NAC) and Ashoka U announced Taylor as one of the three recipients of the “Ashoka U Collaboration Fund”, a grant for Changemaker Campuses to collaborate on an initiative, program, or research project that advances campus-wide changemaking through social innovation or entrepreneurship. These collaborative projects are a key way of accelerating and advancing new models and network insights to get to the ultimate goal of building a robust and rigorous academic field of social innovation education.

Taylor’s proposed project, Changemaker Campus Scholars Reflection and Writing Retreat, is being spearheaded by Laura Murphy, Associate Director at Taylor for Design Thinking for Social Impact and Cheryl Kiser from Babson College. It seeks to organize and facilitate a five-day, intensive writing retreat in a beautiful setting during summer of 2018 for about 20 Changemaker campus faculty and senior administrators from diverse academic disciplines. The retreat will enable participants to conduct their scholarly work individually and also in community, with the aim of “advancing the field of social innovation within higher education”. Specific outputs will include: individual writing/scholarly projects, as well as emergent efforts such as joint intellectual projects, a networked community of practice, and recommendations for NAC/Changemaker campuses to support faculty engagement and research/scholarship. This builds on the significant energy expressed across the network to engage faculty and catalyze research that will advance the field. Two to three faculty organizers/reviewers are needed to complete the selection and planning committee and to represent different disciplines and campuses. It is anticipated that the committee will research venue logistics this summer and issue a call for applications in the fall to participate and/or request a stipend to offset travel costs.

Congratulations to the other recipients of the fund. Other winning proposals include the Expanding HELIO (Human Ecology Lab in Ōsakikamijima): Redesigning Japanese Higher Education with the Ashoka U Consortium which is led by College of the Atlantic and stands to foster faculty engagement and professional development, in addition to the ongoing student exchange, and fuel the founding of a new college whose mission is directly and inseparably tied to social innovation education. The Changemaker Innovation Generator, a residential exchange embedded within Masters of Social Innovation programs delivered across a partner consortium of Ashoka U institutions. The consortium will be built initially through a collaboration amongst the University of Northampton, the University of San Diego, and Fordham.