The Changemaker Institute (CI) is a social venture accelerator for Tulane graduate students that deepens students’ understanding of social issues, connects them to local mentors and experts, and equips them with entrepreneurial tools to create a social enterprise.Learn About CI
Scholars, faculty, graduate students, community leaders, and other writers interested in the field of social innovation, changemaking, social justice, social impact, among other related subjects are invited to join this 4-week writing challenge.
Join the Taylor Center at this interactive discussion with two faculty members who became directors of nonprofit organizations. Dr. Mallory Monaco Caterine is a Professor of Practice in Classical Studies and a co-director and a founding member of Kallion, a non-profit organization whose mission is to design and develop communities around the study of humanities and unlock the human talent able to develop creative, benevolent, and lasting improvements to our common condition. Dr. Shannon Blady is a Professor of Practice at Tulane’s Teacher Preparation and Certification Program and the Executive Director of AfterCLASS, a non-profit whose mission is to provide professional, emotional, and social support to local educators and elevate the profession of teaching.
The Taylor Center's monthly Design Thinking Breakfast is a space to build community among those using design, design thinking, and related methods for social impact with some local flavor, particularly from the greater New Orleans area and the Gulf South.
The October guest host is Jacinda Walker, MFA. She is renowned for her work in design, diversity, research, and strategy and is the founder and creative director of designExplorr, a social enterprise whose mission addresses the diversity gap within the design profession.
A design thinking workshop exploring how to use (virtual) ethnography to understand human experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rebecca Otten will be a speaker in Ashoka U’s "Leading for Resilience and Relevance in Higher Ed", a two-part virtual series for educators and leaders in higher education seeking to harness the power of changemaking in the classroom and across campus.
Otten is a Professor of Practice and the Director of Strategy & Engagement at the Taylor Center, and the former director of the Tulane School of Architecture’s minor in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (SISE).
This month the Research and Scholarship Team is piloting a new writing challenge structure: a November writing support group.
This semester is coming to a close and to say that it has been challenging does not fully express the arduous nature of Fall 2020. Keeping this in mind and with Thanksgiving quickly approaching, we are hosting a two-week writing support group. We want to create an empathetic space for researchers and scholars to accomplish personal writing goals while coping with the effects of multiple stressors (the global pandemic, recent hurricane, presidential election, upcoming holiday season, or any other personal obstacles we may not know about).
This is a workshop that explores poetry as a design research tool applicable in the current environment of a pandemic. Poetry Activism helps in engagement with communities, understanding their positive and negative experiences in a way that can lead to greater societal impact. The aim is to see poetry as a simple method of expression and integrate it as a source of creative and self-healing outlet that could potentially be used as resourceful data in research.
A design thinking workshop exploring how to use cultural probes to find out what matters to people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design Thinking (DT) Gumbo is a series of one-hour workshops on a variety of methods that can be used in design research.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it necessary to explore different ways of thinking and re-imagining new futures. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to co-creation methods that focus on the future, in particular Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR), a research method that allows people to be critical of the present, dream of utopia, and then to take action. This method combines utopian thinking and social learning to act upon critical experience and co-create visionary ideas directed by imagining better futures. Participants will learn how other researchers have used this method in their own work, with a particular emphasis on how it has been used in design research. Finally, participants will learn to use CUAR-based approaches in a few short activities.
